Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Umm. Well. I try not to.”

“You try not to believe?”

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

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

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

“But human beings have—”

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

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

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

“Beanie Babies? The kiddie stuffed toys?”

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

“Bei——?”

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

“So, you do think the Bible a good thing?”

“Umm. Well. To be-labor my apiarian analogy: the honey that’s dipped from that busy hive can be sweet and nourishing, or it can be hallucinogenic and deadly. All too frequently, the latter is confused with the former. Dip with caution. Reader be-ware.”

Domino studied him, but he couldn’t tell if it was with appreciation or contempt. To break the silence, and perhaps to win favor, he revealed that less than a year before, he had been considering joining the Catholic Church. He didn’t mention Suzy.

“What?! Are you mad? How could you possibly be a member of the Church and yet not belong or believe?”

“Easy. It’s the best way. To practice a religion can be lovely, to believe in one is almost always disastrous.”

Understanding him to mean that to practice Christ’s teachings and not believe in them was a finer thing than to fervently believe in them but never put them into practice, she had to nod in tenuous agreement. He was standing hypocrisy on its head. “Is that the way you managed to work for the CIA?”

“Yeah, probably, now that you mention it. It’s called participation without attachment.”

“But I don’t . . .”

“Because the CIA is an extremist organization that has the unusual ability to function outside the compromising channels of normal political and commercial restraint, it has the potential to kick out the blocks here and there and help the world to happen. The original teachings of Jesus and Mohammed et al are also extreme. If a person can participate in those extreme systems without identifying with the humbug they’ve spawned, without becoming attached to, say, patriotism in the case of the CIA, or moralistic zeal, in the case of the Church, then that throbbing nerve that runs from the hypothalamus to the trigger finger might be sedated, minds might be liberated, and—who knows?—the logjam of orthodoxy and certitude might be broken, allowing the—what shall we call it?—river of human affairs to gurgle off freely in new and unexpected directions. Something like that. Cha-cha-cha.”

“Is that your faith then? Freedom and unpredictability?”

He finished off his tea. “My faith is whatever makes me feel good about being alive. If your religion doesn’t make you feel good to be alive, what the hell is the point of it?”

For a moment, she seemed taken aback. Then she snapped, “Comfort.”

“Heh!” He sounded so much like Maestra he almost gave himself a bracelet.

“Hope.”

“I can’t do the math, but wouldn’t x amount of hope cancel out x amount of faith? I mean, if you have faith the sun’s going to rise in the morning, you don’t have to hope it will.”

“Solace.”

“Solace? That’s why God made fermented beverages and the blues.”

“Salvation.”

“From what? Aren’t you talking about some form of long-term, no-premium, afterworldly fire insurance?”

Domino didn’t respond, and he worried that he might have gone too far. “Of course,” he said, “I’ve also never seen the point of chicken wings. Either for the chicken, who doesn’t fly, or for the diner, who doesn’t get enough meat to justify all the grease it takes to make them halfway edible.”

A sudden blink of wistfulness caused her eyes to grow even softer than usual. “Tell me, do they still have the Philly cheese steak?”

“You bet they do. There are some things a person can count on.”

She smiled, and it was, he thought, like a cross between the Taj Mahal and a jukebox. “Is there anything right now that is making you feel glad about being alive?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. I’m in a foreign country, illegally, in a mysterious convent, inappropriately, and in conversation with the blue nude’s niece, improbably. What’s not to enjoy?”

Briefly, very briefly, she closed her palms and fingers around the fists he’d rested on the armrests. “And in a wheelchair, unfortunately.” She stood. “Okay. I must go now and visit my auntie. The excommunication has hit Masked Beauty quite hard. Hit all of us, really. But we will go forward.” She straightened the sweet-smelling sprig behind her ear. She moved away.

Near the door, she paused. “Now that the patriarchal authorities have found our tiny band of desert nuns unfit to be in their Church, we’re having to redefine our relationship to our religion. In addition to that, we have been trying for some years now to redefine our relationship to Christ, to Mary, to God. God is a fixed point, naturally, God is eternal and absolute, God doesn’t change. But man’s concept of God, man’s interpretation of God, the way we view God has changed many times over history. Sometimes we think of him as more intimate, other times more impersonal and aloof; in some centuries he was seen to be primarily angry and judgmental and vengeful; in others, more loving and accepting. Our image of God evolves. Yes? And what would our ideas of God, of religion, be like if they had come to us through the minds of women? Ever think of that? We concentrate on such matters here, and for that reason I very much appreciate my talk with you, for while I may disagree with many of your absurd notions, you show me how it’s possible to think freely, without constraints or limitations or preconceptions. That’s helpful.”

“We absurdists are always pleased to be of service.”

“I also appreciate getting to tell you our own story. Because even though you refer to our convent as ‘mysterious,’ you now can see that our ceremony at the bonfire was a logical, pragmatic thing, like all of our activities. We are as simple as a candle, Mr. Switters. There’s no magic here, no mystery.”

“No, I guess not,” he conceded. “Except, of course, for the document.”

Domino blanched. “Ah, yes,” she sighed, after a time. “The document. The Serpent in our Eden.”

Maria Une delivered his lunch, and after it had been absorbed by that ball of mystic white light that he imagined to occupy his lower torso, its nutrients reconverted into photons, the chaff transformed into what he was prone to label “dark matter,” as if bodily waste were the ash from a dead star, he e-mailed Maestra an account of the curious blue nude coincidence. Then, hating it all the while, he exercised for well over an hour, turning his cot into a gym mat, a platform upon which he performed sit-ups, push-ups, crunches, and other forms of self-torture as required by the tyranny of maintenance.

So exhausted was he by the strenuous workout that he fell asleep after reading less than a page of Finnegans Wake. When he finally awoke, it was dark. His dinner tray had been left on the bedside stool, and alongside the cornucopiate pita sandwich, there was a large glass of red wine (tea, eat your heart out!) and a sprig of orange blossoms.

He wouldn’t see Domino until morning, but when morning finally came (he had read most of the night), he seemed so hale and fit (the workout had paid a dividend) that she proposed a tour of the oasis. For the next hour, she pushed his chair around the grounds.

Against the thick mud walls of the various buildings, yellow roses bloomed, and in the willows that surrounded the large spring that was the centerpiece and lifeblood of the compound, cuckoos sang. Irrigation troughs funneled water from the spring to gardens dense with tomatoes, cucumbers, chickpeas, and eggplants. In groves scattered throughout the oasis, there were trees that each in its own season bore figs, almonds, oranges, pomegranates, walnuts, dates, and lemons. Chickens scratched beneath jasmine bushes, as if doing a kind of archaic arithmetic; a solitary donkey swished its tail with such regular cadence that it might have been a pendulum for keeping the time of the world; and a few runty black goats bleated and chewed, bleated and chewed, in a manner that suggested they were eating their own voices. A great peace and a floral fragrance hovered about the place: it probably was at least a low-rent approximation of Eden.

“The Syrian government doesn’t object to your being here?” Switters asked, recalling that no country on earth with the possible exception of Israel had experienced historically as many religious massacres as Syria.

“Au contraire. Damascus loves us. It can point to our token convent as an example of its tolerance and diversity. We’re good, how do you say, PR for Syria. Damascus likes us better than Rome does.”

Outside the arched and latticed doorway that led into the dining hall, Domino formally introduced him to each of the sisters. Each, that is, except for the one he most desired to meet. They ranged from Maria Une—the oldest, save for the elusive Masked Beauty—to Fannie, the youngest at thirty-four, and the most overtly friendly. In between, there was Maria Deux, taciturn and pinch-faced; ZuZu, who resembled the wine-jolly hostess of a TV cooking show; frizzy, foxy-eyed Bob, who might have been Einstein’s twin sister; Pippi, who was cinnamon-haired, heavily freckled, and wore a carpenter’s belt; and Mustang Sally, petite, plantain-nosed, and festooned with the kind of spit curls that hadn’t been seen on a Frenchwoman since BrassaÏ photographed Paris’s backstreet bar girls in the 1930s. In their identical ankle-length Syrian gowns, they might have been a culture club, a Greek sorority, perhaps, organized by mildly eccentric middle-aged Ohio housewives in a chronic pang of misplaced aesthetic longing. On the other hand, they were poised, tranquil, earnest, and highly industrious. They nodded politely when Domino informed them that their guest was fully recovered from fever, thanks to God and Pachomian charity, and would be departing their company on the supply truck the following day or the day after. His presence must have been a novelty, though whether welcomed or resented he couldn’t tell. Certainly, with the notable exception of Fannie, the women appeared anxious to return to their labors.

Domino resumed the tour, pushing him out past the grape arbor, generator shed, burn barrel, and compost heaps, out to, and then around, the parameters of the high, solid wall that separated her gentle green island from the harsh sandy vastness that surrounded it. Eventually they arrived back at the great gate, and it was there, as she slowed to impart some fact or other (she seemed to enjoy wheeling him around: women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates?), that he noticed on the ground to the right of the gate a pair of wooden poles that had wedges attached to them about eighteen to twenty inches from the bottom.

Switters pointed. “What are those?” he asked.

“Those? Uh, in French they’re called les échasses. I can’t remember the English. The nuns use them to be tall enough to look through the hole in the gate.”

“Stilts,” he whispered. “I’ll be double damned.” He swatted his brow smartly with the palm of his hand. “Stilts! Of course! Why haven’t I thought of that?”

To Domino’s astonishment, he stood on the seat of his Invacare 9000 XT and had her, protesting all the while, lean against the upright stilts to steady them while he climbed onto their footrests. At his signal, she stepped aside, and off he clumped, moving the right stilt forward and then the left—before he went sprawling onto his face. He’d covered less than a yard.

But he insisted on trying it again. And again. Covering a greater distance each time before he fell. Domino was beside herself. “You’ll break an arm! You’re ruining your nice suit! How can you stand on these cotton-pick . . . , on these damn stilts when you can’t stand on the ground?”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll explain later. Let’s go. I can do this. I did it when I was a kid in Redwood City.”

She couldn’t restrain him. He was like a puncture in a high-pressure hose, spurting in all directions, spuming with an irrepressible puissance. The longer he remained upright, the more excited he became. Soon—well, whether or not it was soon depended upon one’s perspective: to Domino it seemed longer than a journey across purgatory on a lawn tractor—he was staying up for two or three minutes at a time. He wobbled, he lurched, he teetered and toddled and sprinted. He scattered goats and chickens, crashed into a date palm, got entangled in a laundry line (Oh, those ancient bloomers!), and, through it all, cackled like a lunatic.

Disturbed at their agricultural and domestic chores, the defrocked nuns gawked at him in disbelief and, perhaps, something close to alarm. Domino, running along behind him, pushing his empty chair, urged them breathlessly to ignore the spectacle. As if they could. Fannie, though, gave him an encouraging wink, and once, when he’d adroitly sidestepped a panicked nanny goat, Sister Pippi actually applauded.

In the Gascony region of southwestern France, where Pippi was reared, stiltwalking was somewhat of a tradition. Gascony farmers had once used stilts to wade in marshlands and cross the numerous streams, and were said to be able to run on stilts with amazing speed and ease. Asked to build a set of portable stairs to enable the sisters to see through the sliding peephole in the gate, Pippi, in a fit of fun and nostalgia, had made these stilts instead.

Struck by Switters’s persistence—he kept at it literally for hours—and delighted by his improvement—by late afternoon he was stilting with authority, if not exactly grace—Pippi beckoned him over to the roofed but open-air area at the rear of the storehouse where she maintained a small carpentry shop. “I’ve been saving these for a special occasion,” she said in her Gascogne French, and as Domino squealed “Non, non, non!” Pippi produced from beneath a lumber pile a pair of stilts more than twice as tall as the ones on which Switters had been practicing.

“Wow!” said Switters.

“Non!” said Domino.

“You strap these to your legs,” said Pippi, “so that you don’t need to hold on to poles. But it takes good balance.”

“My balance is unequaled,” boasted Switters, and he used the shorter stilts to boost himself onto the low rear end of the carpentry shop’s slanted roof. With Pippi and Domino holding the superstilts steady, he climbed aboard—and for a few breathtaking seconds, he jiggled, tilted, leaned, and swayed in slow motion, like a dynamited tower so in love with gravity it couldn’t decide which way to fall. After he took a few steps, however, he gained stability, and Domino removed her hands from her eyes. For her part, Pippi shouted instructions and beamed with approval as, over and over again, he circled the carpentry shop. Confident now, he was about to strike out across the compound when Pippi stopped him. Seemed she had another surprise.

A couple of years before, Domino had purchased cheaply in Damascus a bolt of red-and-white checkered fabric. The idea had been to make tablecloths for “Italian night,” the once-a-month occasion when the sisters enjoyed spaghetti and wine as a festive break from their plain Middle Eastern fare. For some reason, the cloth had been shelved and forgotten—by all, that is, except Pippi, who’d snipped off a substantial portion of the bolt and stitched from it a ridiculous pair of skinny trousers whose legs were a good seven feet in length. “Voilà!” she exclaimed, and Switters instantly recognized and approved her intent.

Once the checkered pants had been pulled over the stilts and fastened about his waist, and a tin funnel appropriated as a hat, he set off, head higher in the air than a streetlamp. It was so much like a one-man circus parade that he had little choice but to break into a booming, up-tempo rendition of “Send in the Clowns.”

The sisters abandoned their duties to line up and cheer the funny giant. Even dour Maria Deux had to grin. And each time he staggered past the chapel, he glanced down to see a face pressed to an uncolored pane in the stained-glass window.

Switters paraded. He pranced. He teetered. He waved. He sang. And everyone seemed enchanted. Everyone, that is, except Domino Thiry.

By the time Switters relinquished the stilts, dusk was settling onto the oasis like a purple hairnet through which a few stray strands of blondish daylight curled. After Pippi congratulated him on his performance, she hurried off to crank up the generator. Domino pushed him back to his room, through an archaic pastoral gloaming: cuckoos cooing themselves to sleep in the willows, chickens marching dumbly to the roost (one young hen lingering behind as if wanting to stay up past her bedtime and watch chicken MTV); the comforting, almost touching sight of people quietly performing their evening chores; the pappy air quickened by the fairgrounds smell of frying onions; everywhere a winding down, an innocence, a rhythm, a timelessness, an anticipation of stars, a secret fear of midnight.

The pair didn’t speak. Switters was exhausted, undoubtedly, and Domino seemed in a bit of a pique. In silence they let themselves be swabbed by the curative sheep tail of bucolic twilight. Were they a normal couple in such a setting, they might be looking ahead to supper and wine and parenting and sex and prayers and dreams. As it was, Switters was imagining the possibilities that stilt walking might hold for him (between then and the autumn when he would return to Amazonia), and Domino was wondering how the hell he could walk on stilts in the first place.

That was the very question she fired at him—arms tightly folded, face all aglower—once she had shoved his chair across the threshold with just enough extra force so that he’d been obliged to brake to keep from crashing into the opposite wall. He turned slowly to stare at her, fatigue and just a touch of merriment tempering the fierceness that might otherwise have kindled his eyes. “Un moment,” he croaked, so parched and hungry he could scarcely speak. He tipped the water pitcher, drinking from it directly and not stopping until it was dry. Then he rolled to the crocodile valise, from which he withdrew a half-stale Health Valley energy bar, which he devoured in four mighty chomps. During the time he took to refresh himself, she changed neither position nor expression.

Wiping his mouth with the torn sleeve of his jacket, he turned to her once more. “Okay, Sister—if I may still call you that. . . .”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake! Can’t you just say Domino!?” She must have surprised herself with the heat in her voice because she immediately softened her face and her tone. “In the Middle Ages, a domino was a black-and-white mask that people wore during carnival. So, you see, my name connects me to my aunt in still another way.”

“Okay. Cool. Did you notice, Domino, that each and every time I fell off the stilts, no matter how hard I fell or in what position I landed, I managed to bend my legs so that my feet never touched the ground? No? Yes? You’re not quite sure? Well, I did, and they didn’t. You are now about to find out why.”

After the painful experience with Suzy, it was unthinkable that he would lie to Domino. (Maybe he couldn’t lie to the Devil or God.) Nor was he inclined to offer her the abridged version that he’d related to Maestra and Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald. No, he gave her, as she stood transfixed in the doorway, the full account, complete with Sailor Boy stew and penis-jab, although he did first warn her, much as he had Bad Bobby, that what she was about to hear was so unbelievable that he scarcely believed it himself. And he left purposefully vague the precise outlines of Today Is Tomorrow’s head: there would be limits to her credulousness.

The telling took the better part of an hour, and when at last he slapped his now permanently soiled trouser legs as if to punctuate the end of the story, Domino seemed, well, not so much perplexed as hypnotized, not so much stunned as drunk, her customary radiance restored, even intensified, like the sultan’s chronically sick wife who was miraculously restored to health by the stinking beggar’s fairy tales. She said little, however; just looked kind of goofy in a dignified way and then excused herself to try to digest the strange and perhaps tainted ambrosias he’d just fed her.

“I’ll be packed,” he called after her. “In case the truck to Deir ez-Zur comes in the morning.” And to himself: But I’ll be damned if I’ll blow this falafel stand without having a peek at Masked Beauty.

As it turned out, however, by 7:30 A.M., when Domino knocked with his breakfast tray, something had happened that put a spin—positive or negative, he honestly couldn’t say which—on his desire to meet the once blue nude. Life was Finnegans Wake, to be sure, except for those times when it was Marvel Comics.

“Look at this,” Switters muttered, barely glancing up from the computer over which he was hunkered, and on the screen of which a message from Maestra dully shimmered in a state of inkless, bloodless, ephemeral, somehow untrustworthy electronic quiddity. Squinting, Domino read over his shoulder, slowly extracting the salient facts from the hard-nosed rococo of Maestra’s prose.

It appeared that the Matisse oil that had hung for so many years over Maestra’s living room mantel; the painting that had enlivened certain of Switters’s boyhood fantasies and that briefly had seemed destined to become his own; the ace up his grandmother’s filmy financial sleeve; the innovative razzmatazz ramble of flattened pigment inspired by the naked body of Domino’s aunt, was, in a word—in two words, to be exact—stolen property.

And when the painting was reproduced in the auction house catalog, its rightful owner had come forth.

In January 1944, five months before Allied troops landed at Normandy, the last prominent Jewish family left in the south of France had been finally discovered and arrested. Their hiding place, an abandoned mill, was comfortably, even elegantly furnished, and among articles confiscated there by the Nazis were artworks that the cultivated fugitives had continued to accumulate, even in their time of peril. A few weeks later, Matisse’s Blue Nude 1943 was loaded aboard a train that departed Nice, bound, presumably, for Berlin. That was the last that the family, imprisoned and tortured, or Matisse, aging and forgetful, was to hear of it. Until, that is, it turned up at Sotheby’s just now, where it attracted the attention of the lone surviving member of that persecuted family, who immediately laid claim to it.

The good news for Maestra was that the grateful owner was presenting her with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar reward (a fraction of its worth) for having “protected” the painting for all those years and for surrendering it without a legal battle. The interesting news for Switters was that the owner turned out to be Audubon Poe’s patron, the Beirut-based businessman, Sol Glissant.

“That is interesting to me, as well,” said Domino. “Not only because of the picture and its connection to my aunt but because Sol Glissant happens to be the benefactor who donated to the Pachomian Order this oasis!”

“Are you jiving me? Enough, already! If the world gets any smaller, I’ll end up living next door to myself.”

“Oh, but I am beginning to find these . . . these coincidences involving you and Masked Beauty and the painting and all of us to be exciting, to be meaningful. Suppose they are omens? Operating instructions from the Almighty? This news from your grandmother, it only makes me more confident that what I am about to propose to you is the correct decision.”

She had his full attention then. Clicking off the computer, he gazed at her directly, finding her at that instant more than usually vivacious.

“We spoke of you last night after dinner and again this morning, all of us, including Masked Beauty, and we have decided to ask you to stay on with us here at—at the convent. If I may still call it that.”

Switters felt something subtle slither out of his nether regions and up his spine, but he would have been hesitant to label it kundalini. Even before she revealed the reasoning behind this surprising request, he could sense his vision of getting Seattle’s Art Girls involved with stilts—stilt-making, stilt-racing, stilts for stilts’ sake—fading into vacancy.

Domino’s reasons were both practical and philosophical.

Switters excelled at languages. He had advanced computer equipment and a satellite telephone. He was adept in their use. Isolated more than ever from the world at large, the sisterhood would benefit in numerous ways from establishing electronic and telecommunicative links with those it wished to influence, assist, save, or solicit for funds. Because of his experience in the CIA, he might also be helpful in dealing with Middle Eastern political situations and the never-ending whirlpool of Vatican intrigue. He would become their communications expert, office manager, and security chief. He’d put the thorn on their rose and the skin on their drum.

Quite aside from that was his gender. The nine Eves had judged that it might be a good idea, after all, to admit an Adam to their little Eden. No longer bound, except by choice, to their vows, some among them had suggested that it was not merely elitist but cowardly to shun all masculine contact. What were they afraid of? Did they lack confidence in their choices? They were feminists of a sort, but well aware that reviling half the human race was a component neither of true feminism nor the Christian faith. Wasn’t Jesus a man? (They weren’t so sure about God.) Hadn’t men (St. Pachomius, their fathers) begat them, figuratively and literally? They were in general agreement that they could use a dose of healthy male energy in their lives. It had to be said that Domino, for one, was not entirely convinced that Switters was a healthy manifestation of male energy, but that question would resolve itself in time.

Meanwhile, she, personally, was fascinated by his Amazonian escapade, by the so-called curse upon him. She believed that she, through prayer, Christian ritual, and modern psychology could break the spell he believed himself to be under. Jesus was known to have cast out beaucoup demons, and over the centuries quite a few priests had followed his example. She saw no need for Switters to venture back into that dark, damp, teeming jungle—he was at heart a desert person, just like her. She was sure she could help him. It was her duty.

Switters tugged repeatedly at one of the more springy of his barley-colored curls, as if it were a cheap plastic ripcord and he in Mexican freefall. “How long do I have to think it over?”

“Oh, somewhere between twenty-four hours and twenty-four minutes. It depends upon the truck.”

He tugged some more, he furrowed his brow. The small scars on his face seemed to furl into nodes. “Do you suppose I might lubricate my cognitive apparatus with some squeezings from your swell vineyard?”

“But you haven’t eaten your breakfast. It’s not yet eight o’clock in the morning.”

“The wine doesn’t know that. Wine only recognizes two temporal states: fermentation time and party time.”

“Yes, but you must eat your omelet. The sausage in it is from chicken.”

“Fine. I like chicken. Tastes just like parrot.”

Without further protest, she went off to fetch a bottle of red, leaving him to ponder her unexpected proposal and—because his mind, even when unlubricated, was disposed toward extrapolatory zigzag—some advice given him years earlier concerning middle-aged palm trees.

It was in the South Seas, on one of those sweet little coconut isles where the word for vagina has a preposterous number of vowels. (On second thought, maybe the vowels aren’t excessive, considering that vowels do possess a decidedly yonic quality, particularly when contrasted with the testosterone flavor of most consonants.) He was sitting at the end of a dock in the company of an American-born professional diver who, for an annual stipend from Langley, kept an eye on French activities in that part of Polynesia. Switters had come down from Bangkok to pass to him some new cryptography software. The delivery completed, they were sipping rum and gazing out to sea.

“Man,” said Switters, “that’s a nasty-looking crowd of clouds over there, all rough and raggedy-assed and milling about, like a herd of white-trash shoppers just crawled out of shacks and sheds and trailer homes for the end-of-winter sale at Wal-Mart.”

“Storm’s coming,” the diver predicted. “A big ‘un.”

“Not a typhoon, I hope,” said Switters, glancing over his shoulder at the small, casually built wood-frame houses that dotted the unprotected shore. “I don’t think I’d want to be frolicking about this paradisiacal poker chip if a real typhoon bore down on it.”

“Nothing quite like that today,” the diver assured him. “But do you know what to do if you’re ever caught on a beach like this during a typhoon or a hurricane? The company not teach you that? Well, you tie yourself halfway up the trunk of a middle-aged palm tree.”

“Why so, pal?”

“Elementary. An older palm tree will be dry inside and stiff and brittle. In a big gust, it’ll snap right off and drop you in the raging flood with a couple hundred pounds of tree trunk strapped to your back. A youngish tree may be graceful and slim and easy to climb, but ultimately it’s too springy, too lithe, too pliable: it’ll bend nearly double in the gale and dip you underwater and drown you dead. Your middle-aged palm, though, is just right. Solid, but still has enough sap in it to be somewhat limber. Neither break nor flop. It’ll give you the strong, flexible support you need to keep from being carried off or blown away.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” Switters promised, and sliced another lime for their drinks. In truth, he gave it no further thought whatsoever until that morning in the Syrian desert, far from any ocean, awaiting his hostess’s return from the convent wine pantry; and then he was only partially serious when he asked himself if a woman such as Domino might not be the human equivalent of the middle-aged palm, the personified tree to which the tempest-tossed might emotionally attach themselves without fear of being undone by, say, naive Suzylike whimsicality or crotchety Maestralike recalcitrance. Not that he viewed himself as any orphan of the storm, exactly, but he was at rather loose ends until his planned return to Peru in the autumn, and barring another assignment from Poe, Domino’s offer was perhaps his most interesting prospect and certainly the most substantial.

In any case, upon her return with the bottle, Domino did nothing to discredit the arboreal comparison, so, for better or worse, he might as well entertain it. At the very least, he was learning that for some Western women—even pious ones—middle age needn’t necessarily mean dowdiness, torpor, or capitulation.

“Now,” said Switters, after swirling the first big gulp of wine around in his mouth and swallowing it with satisfaction, “don’t get the idea I’m a boozer. Setting out deliberately to get drunk is pathological. I like to drink just enough to change the temperature in the brain room. I’ll turn to less mainstream substances if I want to rearrange the furniture.”

Since there was a finite amount of wine on the premises and the nearest liquor store was days away, Domino wasn’t particularly worried about his drinking habits. She had other concerns.

“Should you decide to remain with us,” she said, “you may become very homesick for America.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. Haven’t spent much time there in the past ten years.” He drew in a long, hard breath of wine. “America,” he mused. “America’s pretty violent and repressive these days. But as my pal Skeeter Washington might put it, it’s a ‘bouncy’ violence, a ‘bouncy’ repression, often ribboned with exuberance and cheer. Believe it or not, America’s a very insecure country. It’s been scared into a kind of self-imposed subjugation first by the imagined threat of Communism and then by the imagined threat of drugs. Maestra calls us an ‘abusive democracy,’ one in which everybody wants to control everybody else. Lately, even tolerance, itself, has been usurped by the sanctimonious and the opportunistic, and turned into an instrument for intimidation, bullying, and extortion. Yet the U. S. continues to pound its sternum and boast that it’s the home of the brave and the land of the free. If that’s brazen chutzpah rather than blind naiveté, then I guess I can’t help but admire it.”

The wine had wasted no time greasing the pistons of his tongue, and he probably would have gone on to expound upon his observation that in the late 1960s, everything in America—art, sports, cinema, journalism, politics, religion, education, the justice system, law enforcement, health care, clothing, food, romance, even nature: everything—had devolved into forms of entertainment, and how, by the nineties, most of those forms of entertainment had become almost exclusively about merchandising. However, Domino aborted his rant by stating, with just a flicker of accusation, “You worked for perhaps the most notorious fearmongering institution in your fearful America.”

“Mmm. That’s right, I did. It’s called ‘riding the dragon.’ “

“It can also be called ‘seeking sensation.’ I think you have a need to be always stimulated, to be the action man. How do they call it now? A player. Yes?”

“Only an errand boy,” he protested, refilling his glass with wine as dark as a monster’s gore. “Only an errand boy.”

“Describe it however you wish, I still think you crave to work close to the bull. Or the dragon, if you prefer. But in Spain they say that the matador in time becomes the bull. Is not he who rides the dragon part of the dragon?”

“Not if he’s fully conscious.”

“Perhaps not. But I believe there is much to be said for active withdrawal. Not apathy, you understand, not acquiescence or inertia. Ah! My English vocabulary is coming back like the swallows to Cappuccino. No, what I am speaking of is a refusal to participate. A choice to live in a kind of voluntary exile. To observe the dragon from a distance, to study its strengths and weaknesses but to reject it, resist it, by refusing to engage it and give it energy. For example, we Pachomians, after our excommunication, debated going off, one by one, to Third World villages, where we would try to convince a few native women of the wisdom and urgency of limiting procreation. Our successes probably would have been small, our psychic expenditures great. Instead, we decided to stay here in the wilderness, secluded in holy shadow, shooting sometimes our tiny arrows from concealment but mainly working on the growth of our souls, and guarding . . . that which is ours to guard. So, Mr. Switters, what do you think of active withdrawal? Is it selfish? Is it cowardly? Irresponsible?”

“Nope,” he said between sips. “Not if you’re fully conscious.”

From the way in which she tilted her head, leaning toward him ever so slightly while the flabby razor of incomprehension carved a little crease in her brow, it was obvious Domino was unsure what he meant exactly by “fully conscious.” He ought to have been able to explain, to inform her that full consciousness referred not so much to a state in which a person always behaved in a manner he or she knew to be just, regardless of public opinion, though that was important; nor even to an awareness so keen that the person never allowed fear, ego, desire, or convenience to delude him or her into believing their behavior was more just than it actually was, though that was nearer the point; but rather, to the clear and persistent realization that at bottom, all human activity was cosmic theater: a grand and goofy and epic and ephemeral show, in which an individual’s behavior, good or bad, was simply the acting out of a role, the crucial thing being to stand back and observe one’s performance even as one was immersed in it. Switters ought to have been able to elucidate for the simple reason that this definition of “fully conscious” closely resembled the unwritten, unspoken creed of the CIA angels. However, Bobby Case had warned him that it was always a mistake to attempt to define terms such as full consciousness. “Even iffen you do a good job of it,” Bobby said, “you’ll end up sounding like a checkbook mystic or some New Age mynah bird, and most folks won’t get it anyhow.” According to Bobby, a person got it—bingo!—or they didn’t; no amount of spelling it out or scholarly discourse was going to peel the peach. And, come to think of it, had Sailor Boy, after issuing his concise counsel, ever felt the need to add anything more? Not once. That settled it. Switters lowered his lids, blanking out Domino’s not quite comprehending gaze. He smacked his lips. “Mmm. A most accommodating vintage. Makes my palate feel like the jewel in the lotus, like a taxfree investment, like a pocket street-map of Hollywood, like Lincoln’s doctor’s dog, like—”

“A mediocre wine and you know it,” she corrected him, though a certain glint in her eye indicated that she, influenced now, might be incubating a thirst of her own. “Well,” she said, “even if you don’t object philosophically to active withdrawal, that doesn’t mean you are personally suited for it. For example, we are very orderly here.”

“So? Nothing wrong with that—as long as you don’t deceive yourself into believing your order is superior to somebody else’s disorder.”

“But, disorder is—”

“Often just the price that’s charged for freedom. Order, so-called, has claimed more victims historically than disorder, so-called; and besides, if properly employed, language can provide all of the order a person might ever need in life. Language—”

“You’re throwing me off track. Save language for later.” She nodded at the wine. “All right. I’ll have one sip.” Accepting the glass from him (there was only the one), she went on. “What I’m trying to say is, I worry—all of the sisters worry—that should you accept our invitation, you will find the necessary routines of the Pachomian oasis to be boring and dull.” Rather abruptly, she raised the glass to her mouth and drained it.

A ruby droplet, at once as authentic as blood and as artificial as a bauble of carnival paste, glistened on her upper lip like an Aphrodite love boil, and Switters felt a bewildering urge to expunge it with his tongue. Easy, big fella. “A legitimate concern,” he agreed, “although I’ve generally managed to find a modicum of what we childish Americans call ‘fun’ and you more refined Europeans term ‘pleasure’ any place the bus has dropped me off.”

“That is a talent,” she said, sighing. “Unless you can count Italian nights at the dining hall or romping in rainwater in Vatican bikinis—which is what the sisters were doing at the moment you passed by with your nomads and heard them laughing—we nuns have never placed much emphasis on pleasure. Joy, perhaps, but certainly not fun. So, that is something else you could do for us here: teach us how one might remain sensitive and compassionate, yet still enjoy oneself in such a defiled, destructive age.”

“Oh, I don’t know. . . .”

“But, you see, we must not be thinking only of ourselves, we must not be unfair. You, Mr. Switters, must find pleasure at our Eden, as well, or else you will be dissatisfied here. So. That is where Fannie comes in.” She poured the last of the wine into the glass and passed it back to him.

He frowned. “Fannie?”

“Why, yes. Fannie.” And at that point, the middle-aged palm tree, without so much as swaying, dropped a coconut onto his skull. “Fannie wants to fuck your brains out,” she said.

He jounced a spatter of vin rouge onto the knee of his last clean trousers. And if that wasn’t embarrassing enough, he blushed. He knew he blushed because he could feel himself blushing, which caused him to blush all the pinker. Blushing did not suit a man such as Switters any more than sheep’s lingerie suited a wolf. Domino was surprised by his shock but was also more than a trifle amused.

“What’s the matter?” she asked coyly. “Have I made another passé remark? Doesn’t anyone say ‘fuck your brains out’ anymore? Has it followed ‘cotton-picking’ into the vernacular dustbin?”

“Caught me off guard, that’s all,” Switters muttered. “Didn’t expect—”

“And well you shouldn’t expect such talk from me. I don’t even like to think about these matters. So let’s get it over with quickly.” She took the glass from him and wiped it with a handkerchief before drinking. “It is not unusual for a novice in a nunnery to indulge in what the Church terms the ‘self-abuse.’ You know what I mean. It is discouraged, even punished, but to a certain extent expected and tolerated. Fannie, however, was incorrigible. She played with herself in chapel, at Holy Communion; she diddled in the confessional even as she was asking forgiveness for diddling. It’s reported she masturbated with one hand while counting her rosary prayers with the other. In every additional respect, she was the model novice, hard-working and devout, so the mother superior believed Fannie to be in the grips of an Asmodeus, a demon that is said to possess young nuns to make them lustful. Every exorcist priest in Ireland had a go at her, and when exorcism failed, the Irish shipped her off to a convent in France, where her behavior might be better understood. Why do so many people believe that the French are the sex race, the world leaders in eroticism? Why?”

“Because they’ve never been to Thailand.”

“Really? The Thai are better at sex than us?” Switters thought he detected a soupçon of wounded national pride. “In any case, Fannie ended up with the Pachomians, and now she’s released from vows and is hot to trot: another obsolete expression, I suppose. She likes you. She’s still young and attractive. I find it degrading to pimp like this, but as it may be the only way to assure that both of you are content to remain at the oasis. . . .”

“Well, you can stop it right now. As far as I’m concerned, Fannie can stick with her finger.”

“Why? Don’t you find her appealing?”

“She’s not so bad.” He was about to add, “For a woman of her age,” when it occurred to him that such a sentiment could be both undiplomatic and self-incriminating. What he said instead, however, was worse. He didn’t intend to say it, wasn’t sure he meant it. It contradicted, in fact, the very comment he had so prudently suppressed, a remark that for all of its insensitivity had at least been truthful. He felt ventriloquized, as if the imp in him, for reasons that it alone understood, was throwing its voice. “I guess I thought maybe you and I might . . .”

“Ooh-la-la! No, no, no. You and I? That is ridiculous.”

“Why? Don’t you find me appealing?”

“You’re not so bad,” she said, giving it right back to him (or to the trouble-making bugger who had hijacked his larynx). “For a man of your age.” Had she read his mind? Her tone became more serious. “I lost my virginity when I was sixteen.” (An image of Suzy went zinging through his brain like a hot pink bullet.) “It took me years to get it back. If I ever lose it again, which is rather unlikely, it will be to a man with whom I’m united in Christ. That wouldn’t be you, would it, Mr. Switters?”

“Offhand, I’d say the odds are against it. But stranger things have happened.” (Shut up, you little bastard!)

“No. I doubt if you could meet my standards. You haven’t found maturity yet, and you haven’t found peace.”

He wanted to say, “If you’re referring to that pre-senile stagnation that passes for maturity these days and that hypocritical obsequiousness that passes for peace, I’d rather have shingles than the one and scurvy than the other.” What emerged from his mouth, however, was, “Damn! You sure know how to break a guy’s heart.”

“Nonsense. Even though you told me you loved me the moment you laid eyes on me . . .”

“I did?!” He came within half a hue of blushing again. (While he had lain in helpless delirium, his evil elf must have had a field day.)

“. . . we both know you do not. It was just your usual line of—how do you call it?”

“Flapdoodle?” he suggested helpfully, regaining some control.

“Besides,” she went on, “the pain of love does not break hearts, it merely seasons them. The disappointed heart revives itself and grows meaty and piquant. Sorrow expands it and makes it pithy. The spirit, on the other hand, can snap like a bone and may never fully knit. In the Order of St. Pachomius, we have always worked to build strong spirits. Spirits that can never be broken. Not even by the things that are to come.”

“What things?”

Domino stood. She was light on her feet, yet firmly planted. (Like a palm tree of a certain vintage?) “Your own spirit, for all of its—flapdoodie?—is very stout, I think, and would not be so badly out of place here. Perhaps it’s even needed. But you mustn’t feel pressured. We’ll get along without you. Even Fannie will. And cursed and misguided and lost to Christ as you are, you may actually need us more than we need you. So, you decide. I’ll go away now and let you mull it over. Just remember that the supply truck could arrive at any hour.”

“Wait.” He caught her wrist. It felt as if he’d grabbed the neck of a swan.

“Yes?”

“The truck. From Deir ez-Zur won’t it go back to Damascus?”

“Eventually, but along a different route. It returns to Damascus by way of Palmyra, the oasis town about a hundred kilometers to the south of us.”

Somewhat reluctantly he released her arm. Sister Domino’s flesh was as pure, and as forbidden, to him as Suzy’s always was, and thus had the capacity to make him dizzy. “Hmm. Well. Ah. What’s the date today? Around the first of June, isn’t it? I’ll tell you what. Let’s cut a deal. In the fall, I’ve got to bop down to Peru to see a man about a taboo. But I’ll stay until then. How’s that? I’ll stay through September, providing my grandmother is healthy, and for those—what is it?—four months, I’ll give you my absolute best, although I’m making no promises regarding Fannie. I’ll stay—but there are a couple of conditions.”

Eyes narrowing, she stiffened, turning her cheeks into something resembling toy igloos for Eskimo action figures. She was thinking that Switters was going to insist on being shown Cardinal Thiry’s secret document. He knew she was thinking precisely that, and it made him smile. If that dusty old paper really was the Serpent in their Eden, it undoubtedly would reveal itself to him in time. And if not, he didn’t give a good goddamn. He had other wants.

“First, I want to meet Masked Beauty.”

“Mais oui. Of course you will. That goes without saying.”

“And I want Sister Pippi to build another pair of stilts for me. A shorter pair. A pair whose footrests—this is essential, so listen up—a pair whose footrests are exactly two inches above the ground.”

Bobby Case thought it was hilarious. Hilarious. Switters, the scourge of Iraq, the brave-hearted bane of the pickle factory, the poetry-spouting libertine who raised eyebrows at the C.R.A.F.T. Club, even; Switters, operative’s operative and erstwhile stalwart defender of the erotic rights of the young, now a flunky at a convent, performing mundane clerical services for a gaggle of over-the-hill nuns! Hilarious.

When Bobby learned that the nuns had been recently defrocked, were holed up in a private oasis in the Syrian desert, and answered to an abbess who, in 1943, had been the model for the Matisse nude that graced Maestra’s living room wall, he had to admit that the situation had a novel flavor, a certain cachet. But it was still pretty funny. Bobby had to laugh, despite the fact that Switters could not now accept the assignment in Kosovo that was about to be offered by Audubon Poe. And he undoubtedly would have laughed all the harder had he, like the cuckoos in the willow trees, had a bird’s-eye view of Switters clomping and hopping around the convent grounds on a pair of undersize stilts.

The new stilts hadn’t been long in coming, and, as requested, hadn’t been long in length. The soles of his feet—as smooth and pink as a babe’s—were held off the ground at the barely perceptible height of two inches and not a centimeter less or more, and from that modest elevation he scanned the terrestrial and the astral, inspected the commonplace and the rare, as though he were revolving apace with the axle that turned the Wheel of Things. What cosmic insight was afforded by the two-inch perspective? The only advantage as far as he could tell—perhaps because he cloddishly clumped rather than mystically levitated—was that everything seemed a bit less serious when observed from an ambulatory loge. Of course, that might have been the master’s point. And Today Is Tomorrow’s, as well. A similar thought had even occurred to him in his Invacare 9000. At any rate, he certainly didn’t look like an enlightened being as, ungainly and stiff-legged, he negotiated the oasis’s shady paths. He walked the way furniture might have walked. Or a stick beetle on its journey along a twig.

It wasn’t that he was slow. After a week or ten days of practice, Switters, on stilts, could have beaten any of the nuns in a footrace. Moreover, his movements were entirely devoid of the strain, deliberation, and self-pitying sloth that one sometimes noticed in the physically impaired. On the contrary, he stilted with a reckless ebullience, so glad was he to be free of the wheelchair and its sickly associations. Still, there was something comical about him, like a crow blundering across a pavement grate or a boy in his mother’s high heels (Domino, in fact, wondered why he didn’t simply wear clogs, to which he explained that his survival depended upon there being space, air—oxygen, nitrogen, argon, plus traces of helium, hydrogen, ozone, krypton, xenon, neon, carbon monoxide, and methane—between his feet and the earth), and the sisters never reached a point where they could watch him without some amusement. Bobby, for better or worse, was deprived of the spectacle, but as has been noted, he found the whole business in Syria quite funny, including, once he was let in on it, the business of Sister Fannie. His mirth didn’t prevent him, however, from offering Switters sincere and well-reasoned advice. His e-mail read thusly:

> Whether or not you’re man enough to admit it,

> podner, you’re attracted to innocence like mildew to

> strawberries. But just because that little Irish rosary

> wrangler is a technical virgin, that don’t mean she’s

> pure. From what you tell me, Fannie’s less innocent

> than your average Patpong skivvy girl, intact cherry

> and a million damn Hail Marys notwithstanding. That

> don’t mean squat lessen you want it to, but I’d be

> remiss if I failed to point it out.

> It strikes me that the one you really want is the older

> one (not that Fannie ain’t Methuselah’s eldest

> daughter by your and my usual standards), and I have

> to say I find that both touching and troublesome, like

> when that nice aunt of mine near Hondo used to bake

> me cookies but always shaped and colored them so

> that they looked like ladybugs, which meant I could

> only eat the damn things alone in the root cellar or

> out back of the garage. Well, maybe that there is an

> imperfect analogy. But you listen to Captain Case,

> this is your captain speaking: if you really do have a

> heartfelt hankering for the older one with the name

> that cannot help but evoke memories of Antoine

> better known as Fats, whose rendition of “Blueberry

> Hill” was so frigging awesome and definitive that in

> nearly fifty years hardly any other singer has had the

> balls to try to cover it, then you should not lay a paw

> on Fannie, no matter how sweetly Domino may

> sanction it or swear it’s copacetic. Because once you

> do the deed with Fannie, any chance for romance with

> Domino will have flown out the window like a pigeon

> who just noticed the rotisserie was on.

> Objectively speaking, you might be better off with the

> older one (Forty-six? Are you kidding me? Jesus,

> boy!) for the reason that there ain’t as likely to be

> COMPLICATIONS that might interfere with your

> rumble in the jungle come October.

How did Switters react to Bobby’s advice? Well, he said to himself: I’d eat ladybug cookies in broad daylight in the middle of downtown Hondo or Dallas or any precious place else, including the end-zone bleachers at the Texas-Oklahoma game, and any redneck cracker unevolved atavistic possum-lipped hooligans who were wont to harangue me about it could damn well. . . . Then, suddenly he remembered the album of Broadway show tunes so cautiously concealed in the secret compartment of his crocodile valise, and his bravado dissolved in a hot flush of shame.

That evening, he set up the computer in the dining hall and played the CD throughout dinner. It eased his private guilt only marginally: they were middle-aged French nuns, after all, not a pack of testosteronies, and they, moreover, enjoyed the concert thoroughly, although Mustang Sally did mention during coffee that she preferred rock ’n’ roll.

After the last romantic swell had subsided, he took Fannie by her callused little hand, led her to his room, undressed her, and lay down with her on the tracks before the conjunctional freight train.

Why?

Because “Stranger in Paradise” from Kismet always made him feel . . . libidinous.

Because he refused to believe that he might have a “heartfelt hankering” for Sister Domino.

Because he was not the sort of man to be compromised by rational advice.

Because he was Switters.

Having slept through breakfast the next morning, he arrived, yawning and reeking, at the office they had established for him in the main building to find a note taped to his computer screen. It summoned him to an immediate conference with Masked Beauty.

He had been introduced to the abbess nearly a fortnight earlier, when Domino had escorted him to her quarters, and had had only fleeting glimpses of her since. That initial meeting was memorable, however.

Her apartment was small, no more than double the size of his own room, and sparsely but opulently furnished; which is to say it contained only a tiny table, a cane-bottomed chair, a wooden settee, a chest of drawers, and a corner shrine encircled by wooden candlesticks, yet there were marvelously rich carpets underfoot, the pillows on the settee (which apparently doubled as her bed) were boisterously patterned and could have been stolen from an oriental harem as imagined (or actually visited in Morocco) by Matisse, and the tassel-roped curtains that draped both the windows and doors were of such heavy brocade that they would have strained the back of the stoutest camel and defied the claws of the meanest housecat. Masked Beauty had stood at one of the windows, peering through a narrow part in the brocade, her back turned to Switters as the candles flickered and a cloud of incense smoke seemed to overload with oily perfumes every molecule in the space.

When her tall, erectly held figure slowly pivoted to face him, he saw that she was veiled. The sensation he had was that of being received by a Bedouin matriarch (were there such a thing) or the wife of a minor pasha (were such a reception permitted). Despite the crucifix that hung above the shrine and the image of Mary that dominated its nave, the atmosphere in the apartment was decidedly more Levantine than Roman. Lines from Baudelaire’s “L’Invitation au Voyage,” the very first poem he’d studied at Berkeley, drifted through his mind, lines such as, “In that amber-scented calm” and “Walls with eastern splendour hung,” and, waiting to be introduced, he spontaneously blurted out in French the poem’s refrain: “Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté / Luxe, calme et volupté.”

Domino and Masked Beauty exchanged glances. Both sets of eyes seemed to be smiling. The abbess, in a flat, childish voice, bade Switters sit beside her on the couch while Domino arranged for tea. Then, without excess of preamble, and still under veil, she engaged him in a dialogue about beauté. He told her that in America, socio-political dullards had chopped up beauty and fed it to the dogs sometime in the late 1980s on grounds ranging from its lack of pragmatic social application to the notion that it was somehow unfair to that and those who were, by beauty’s standards, ugly.

The abbess asked if it wasn’t true that beauty was, indeed, useless, to which he responded with an enthusiastic, “Mais oui!” He proclaimed that beauty’s great purpose was always to be purposeless, that its use to society lay in its very uselessness, that its lack of function was precisely what lent it the power to scoop us out of context, especially political and economic context, and provide experiences available in no other area of our lives, not even the spiritual. He likened those philistines who would banish the beautiful from art, architecture, dress, and language in order to free us from frivolous and expensive distractions to those scientists who proposed blowing up the moon in order to free us, psychologically and commercially, from the effects of the tides.

The abbess agreed that a world sans lune would be a poorer world indeed—in the desert, especially, moonlight was the magic frosting that slathered delectability onto the scorched hard torte of the earth—but surely those critics were correct when they complained that ideas and ideals of physical beauty tended, at worst, to oppress the plain in appearance, and, at best, to make them feel inadequate; while giving those graced with comeliness, through no particular effort of their own, a false sense of superiority. “Yeah,” Switters blurted in English, “but so what?” Then, in his halting French, he argued that the two positions were equally egocentric and thus equally inane. Moreover, given the unpleasant option of having to associate with either the self-satisfied beautiful or the self-pitying plain, he’d choose the former every time because beauty could sometimes transcend smugness whereas self-pity just made ugliness all the more unattractive. He was willing to concede, though, that the plastic crown of glamor could bear down as heavily on its wearers as the dung corona of plainness could upon its, and that frequently the difference between the two was merely a matter of fashion, rather than any objective, universal aesthetic indices.

During this banter, which persisted for nearly half an hour, Domino remained silently attentive. She busied herself with refilling their teacups and to his pronouncements outwardly reacted only twice. At one point, he had nodded toward the plaster Virgin in the shrine and wondered why those who had been allegedly visited by Mary at places such as Fatima and Lourdes (homely young girls in both instances) had been moved to dwell upon her physical beauty, comparing her to film stars or pageant queens, when, historically in all probability, she was an average-looking teenager from a dusty backwater shtetl. Both Domino and her aunt had started a bit at that, exchanging meaningful blinks, before the abbess suggested that the girls naturally would have had a limited frame of reference with which to attempt to describe Mary’s holy radiance.

Later, as Domino bent over to pour tea, her chestnut hair had fallen over her face, and the easy grace with which she’d employed her left hand to sweep it back prompted Switters to declare that that gesture, itself, was an unconsciously choreographed act of intense beauty, and of more value, ultimately, to the human race than, say, the sixty new jobs created in a depressed suburb by the opening of a Wal-Mart store. As she straightened up, Domino whispered near his ear, “You’re out of your cotton-picking mind.”

For her part, Masked Beauty had clucked and compared Switters to Matisse, who, she professed, identified the female form with beauty to such a degree that for Henri, it was the perfect symbol of love, truth, and charity; both a garden of sensual delights and a link (more so than prayer) to the divine. “It’s flattering to be adored, I suppose, but that is a terrible burden to load on the backs of women.” She clucked again. “Henri was an old fool, and if you are not careful, you will end up the same.” She laughed. “But Domino was right. You are an interesting fool.”

Now that the subject of Matisse had been broached, Switters wanted to ask the abbess all about the circumstances surrounding the painting of Blue Nude 1943. Before he could facilitate the segue, however, his hostess stood, seeming to indicate that the visit was at an end. Switters rose to face her. She would have been only a couple of inches shorter than he, were he not now back on his stilts, and he found himself checking out her feet to see if she wore some sort of platform shoes. She did not. When he lifted his gaze from her sandals, he saw to his delight that she was loosening her veil. He supposed he was prepared for anything, but he was wrong.

The septuagenarian’s face, when the veil fell away, proved to be nearly as round as her niece’s, yet without a trace of a double chin. She had large but elegant ears, a voluptuous mouth that became frank and impatient at its corners; a nose longer, more bony than Domino’s, though no less perfectly formed; eyes that were the same odd mixture of gray, green, and brown, but whereas Domino’s orbs invited comparisons to, for example, diamond-dusted napalm, amphetamined fireflies, or hot jalapeño ginseng spritzer, Masked Beauty’s, no longer isolated above the veil, seemed to be paling, waxing transparent, as if agate cinders were cooling into a watery ash. In contrast to her thick, wavy, elephant-colored hair, the abbess’s complexion was rosy and youthful, so smooth, in fact, that her skin might have been her most memorable attribute—were it not for that other thing.

That other thing—the thing that cut short any impulse to exclaim, “My God, she must have been gorgeous in her day!”—was a wart. On her nose. Near the tip of her nose. And not just any common, everyday wart. Hers was a singular wart, a wart among warts, the rotten ruby jewel in the crown of wartdom, the evil empress, the burning witch, the tragic diva of the wart world.

Very nearly the circumference of a dime, reddish umber in hue, it appeared spongy in texture, irregular in outline, resembling nothing so much as a speck of hamburger, a crumb of rare ground beef that might have spilled out of a taco. Even as she stood stationary, the wart appeared to shudder, like the tiny heart of a shrew, and to radiate, as if a fungus that grew on raw uranium was practicing for fission. Simultaneously feathery and lumpish, like a squashed raspberry, a pinch of dry snuff, a tuft of moss that a wounded robin had bled upon, or the butt end of an exploded firecracker, it caught the candlelight and in so doing, seemed to enlarge before his eyes.

The really astonishing feature of the protuberance was neither its size nor its color, its brim nor its woof, but the fact, not immediately registered, that it was two-tiered: a second, smaller wart sat atop the first, piggybacking, as it were, like a pencil eraser with a spinal hump, or a little foam-rubber pagoda.

Switters didn’t know what to say. Few did. Which is why, Domino told him later, that her aunt had finally taken up the veil and also why the aunt, herself, had been the one to break the silence. “It’s a gift from God,” she said.

“Are you sure?” asked Switters.

“Positively. My uncle, Cardinal Thiry, gave me no peace about my sexy appearance. Everywhere I went, men, including priests, stared or made remarks. Even novices, other nuns, would eye me lasciviously. My beauty was a distraction for others and an onus for myself. I shaved my head and wore loose clothing, but it made scant difference. So, I began to pray to the Almighty that if he wanted me to do his work, he would grant me a blemish, a physical fault so unappealing that others would be affected only by my deeds rather than my looks. I prayed and prayed, often out in the Algerian desert alone, and—voilà!—one morning I awoke with a honeycombed spot on my nose. The more I prayed—I was the diametric opposite of Lady Macbeth—the more glaring the spot became, but I wouldn’t quit; and, in my thoughtless avidity, obviously, I went too far. Even my wart grew a wart. We must be careful what we pray for. In my old age, I’m left to wonder whether God had not intended me to be a model all along. He gave me the gift of beauty—which in your opinion can make the world a finer place—and I rejected it, exchanged it for this other gift, this organic speckle that is more effective than any mask. Nowadays, I often mask the mask and imagine that I hear God’s laughter in the wind.”

“There’s always cosmetic surgery,” Switters suggested brightly.

She shook her head. The wart, like a plug of hairy gelatin, shook with it. “I’ve scorned one divine gift, I shan’t scorn another.”

After they’d taken their leave of her, Domino said, “Poor auntie. But you see, Mr. Switters, what prayer can do?” For days Domino had been urging him to pray with her for the removal of the shaman’s curse.

“Exactly. If this curse is lifted, it could be replaced with something worse.”

“Oh, but your affliction is not a gift from God. It was levied by the Devil.”

He’d grinned. “I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” he said, half-stepping on his stilts so that she might keep up with him, and from somewhere faraway, he thought he heard a rustle of psychic foliage.

All that had occurred two weeks ago. Now, he was rapping at the apartment door for his second audience with the twice-masked beauty, an encounter that, due to his romp with Fannie, promised to be of a different tenor.

Switters was relieved to find Masked Beauty alone, that she wore her veil (the wart having struck him as pathological), and that her quarters were once again clouded with incense: he’d awakened too late to bathe properly, and Cupid’s briny chlorines clung to him like clamskin britches. No sooner had he hopped off his stilts and onto the settee, however, than Domino breezed in, her bright eyes dancing, her cheeks ablaze. The pair of them, niece and auntie, stood facing him—apparently there was to be no tea—in their long cotton gowns. He switched on his best simper but sensed that the wattage was weak.

“What happened last night?” the abbess asked abruptly.

“Last night? Happened?” If innocence was toilet tissue, Godzilla could have wiped his butt with Switters’s smile. “Why, uh, I took the liberty of providing a dollop of dinner music. Hope it didn’t unduly impinge on anyone’s digestion, or—”

“With Fannie.”

“Oh? With Fannie.” He shrugged. “The usual.”

Domino rolled her eyes, a beautifully seriocomic gesture in a woman that neither Matisse nor his rival, Picasso, neither Modigliani nor Andrew Wyeth, had ever captured. “Usual for you, perhaps. How did it go for Fannie?”

Switters glanced around the room, as if searching for assistance or inspiration. Mute and motionless in her shrine, the shiksa-like Mary offered neither. “Why don’t you ask Fannie?” he said finally and a little defiantly. What was this all about?

“We can’t,” Domino replied, after translating his response for the abbess. “She has gone.”

“Gone? What do you mean?”

“A Syrian surveying team came by very early this morning. Had you arisen at a decent hour you might have noticed. We feared they were police hunting for you, but they only wanted to fill their water casks. When they left, Fannie left with them.”

He scowled. “Voluntarily?”

“It would seem so. She took her belongings.”

“No note?”

“Rien,” said Masked Beauty.

“Nothing,” said Domino.

“Well, dash my dumplings,” said Switters.

The next half hour ranked among the most uncomfortable he’d ever spent. It made him long for the minefields along the Iraqi-Iranian border. As delicately as possible considering the nature of the previous night’s activities, even waxing poetic when circumstance and élan allowed, he attempted to give the women an overview, from his perspective, of how it had gone for Sister Fannie.

He’d rather expected that Fannie would be a scratcher, a screamer, a biter, one of those bedroom banshees whose veneer of civilization was involuntarily ripped away by the claws of Eros. To his surprise, her volcano lay dormant, and no shifting of plates that his undulations engendered could precipitate a measurable eruption. The first time, she had grimaced and whimpered a little, because as gentle as he was, he had hurt her. The second time, she was more relaxed, and the third, in the dawn’s early light, she’d actually cooed a couple of times with pleasure. For the most part, however, she’d been a quietly interested, curious, almost studious participant, eager enough but not in the least demonstrative.

And now she had decamped, leaving him to wonder if losing her virginity at thirty-four mightn’t have been anticlimactic for her, a big disappointment, and, suspecting that it must have been his fault (which, alas, it might have been), and spurred on by her Asmodeus, she’d gone in search of a man or men who might better live up to her long-held expectations. Or, casting himself in a more favorable light, he considered that it might have been so overpoweringly wonderful for her that she’d been unable to speak or move out of sheer awe, and afterward she’d run off to sample a variety of partners in order to make comparisons. (Somehow, that seemed less feasible.) On the other hand, the experience—good, bad, or mediocre—might have buried her beneath such an unexpected avalanche of conditioned Catholic detritus that a spirit-bruising guilt had sent her scurrying home to Ireland to beg refuge as a lay sister in an orthodox nunnery.

“Je ne comprends pas.” He shrugged. “I don’t understand.” Indeed, he didn’t understand, and it would ruffle his masculine feathers for months to come, because Fannie neither returned nor sent any word.

Strangely enough, once he completed his full account of the deeds that had nearly demolished his narrow cot, Domino sighed, smiled sympathetically, and said that Fannie’s exodus, as long as she came to no harm, was probably for the best. For her part, Masked Beauty said nothing more on the subject whatsoever, but instead inquired if Switters would mind teaching her how to operate a computer.

Beginning tomorrow morning, he e-mailed Bobby Case, Matisse’s blue nude will be sitting beside me at this very keyboard.

Far out, Bobby wrote back. Next thing I know, you’ll be knitting socks with “Whistler’s Mother.”

It’s true, I suppose: I am learning to appreciate older women to whom I’m not related. But you needn’t put Whistler’s mother in quotes. The actual title of the painting to which you refer is “Arrangement in Gray and Black.”

Thanks for correcting me. You’re a true friend. I could have made a fucking fool of myself at any number of swell soirees.

“I wish I didn’t,” Switters told his pupil, “but when I leave at the end of September, I have to take this vampire with me.”

Masked Beauty said she understood but that she had reason to believe that God would eventually provide the Pachomians with a computer of their own.

Right, thought Switters. God going under the name of Sol Glissant. Aloud, he explained that it wouldn’t be quite the same, that the sisters would require a server, one with satellite capabilities since there were no telephone lines into the oasis, and should they obtain one, there would be hook-up charges and a monthly fee. When the old abbess asked who his server was, she was surprised to hear him answer, “The CIA.” She’d thought he had severed his ties to that organization. He explained that officially he had, but that he still had friends at the pickle factory, clever angel boys who saw to it that he remained on-line.

“This research you’re going to be doing—and the Langley search engine is the best that exists—will all be paid for by the CIA. No, no, it’s not a problem. Even when it isn’t bribing dictators and financing right-wing revolutions, the company’s got so much money stashed under its mattress it can’t sleep at night for the lumps. The CIA doesn’t submit its accounts to Congress as specifically required by our Constitution, which means it’s an illegal arm of government to begin with. So, even if we’re stealing, we’re stealing from outlaws.”

“I’m unsure that that makes it more virtuous.”

“Maybe not, but it certainly makes it more fun.” At that point, Domino, who’d stopped in to see how the lesson was going and if Switters’s French was up to the task, gave a light little laugh. He grinned back at her and neglected to inform either of them of the high probability that Langley was allowing him to remain on-line so that it could keep tabs on his activities, those, at least, to which he gave electronic voice.

He went on to warn Masked Beauty that the computer would tax her Christian patience, for while the machine was developed as a time-saving device, it frequently ate up far more time than telephone calls or physical trips to the library. “Some of the Web sites you may want to visit will be getting so many hits you’ll have to queue up like a Chihuahua waiting for its turn at the world’s last bone. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the Internet, there’re just too damn many people using it. Too damn many people using the roads, using energy, using parks and trees and beaches and cows and sewers and planes, using everything except good taste and birth control, although I suppose those two may be the same thing. I mean, did you get a look at the parents of the American septuplets? And did you think of geometric progression and shudder in horror? That one couple’s one tasteless test-tube tumble could dork down the entire gene pool?”

Neither of the Frenchwomen was familiar with the “little miracle in Iowa,” but, as he well knew, overpopulation and its myriad foul consequences was a paramount interest of theirs, so his rantlette garnered a favorable response. He was mistaken, however, in his supposition that Masked Beauty’s travels on the Internet would be limited to sites either directly concerned with family issues or ones that provided the occasional forum for those who were. She would, with his assistance, visit such sites from time to time, but the primary focus of the Pachomian abbess’s investigations proved to be on a different subject altogether. Fortuitously, perhaps, it was a subject to which Switters, the previous year, had devoted a modicum of attention.

June. July. August. September. Summer in the Northern Hemisphere—which included, naturally and, as a matter of fact, emphatically, the Syrian desert. The sun was as red as a baboon’s backside. Relentless, it rose each and every morning and like a malicious baboon climbing a staircase, treated those trapped on the ground floor to a rude display.

Serrated with heat, abuzz with wind-whipped sand, the air outside the compound was like a bouquet of hacksaws. Within the walls, plenteous pools of shade made life bearable, though it was far from cool. At odd moments, orchard trees would quiver, as if trying to shake themselves free of the heat, or would tilt ever so slightly, as if longing to lie down in their own shade. Then, all would grow still again until the next brimstone breeze wafted with a gritty obduracy out of the great oven door. It was an oven that knew well the stern exertions of soda and salt, but not at all the puffy gaieties of yeast.

The pace inside the oasis was slow, and summer seemed to drone on like a filibuster, even to Switters, who was one of those who believed that time in general was gathering speed. When he wasn’t asleep on his Fannie-crippled cot, perusing the odd paragraph of Finnegans Wake, or exchanging the infrequent correspondence with Bobby or Maestra, he was interacting, in various, particular, and for the most part lackadaisical ways, with the eight pious pariahs with whom he shared the outpost.

Where most of the ex-nuns were concerned, interaction was fairly minimal. He joined them for simple meals at one or the other of two rude wooden tables; and complaining that “Italian nights” were too few and far between, he instigated thrice weekly “music nights,” meaning that on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays (the sisters fasted on Sundays, and Switters was forced to steal into the garden then and eat cucumbers off the vine), he’d lug his equipment into the dining hall and play during supper a CD from his limited collection. It goes without saying that he wished wine to flow on those occasions (“Let us be festive!” he’d cry, or “Let the good times roll!”) but succeeded in getting it served only on Saturdays. Saturday became “blues night,” for the women had rather taken to his two Big Mama Thornton recordings; on Thursdays he treated them to the Mekons (about whom they were lukewarm), Frank Zappa (whom they actively disliked), or Laurie Anderson (they were baffled but fascinated); while on Tuesdays, never without a tinge of concealed embarrassment, he’d spin Broadway show tunes (nearly everybody’s favorite).

In his self-appointed role as recreation director, he tried to get them involved in making toy boats and racing them in the irrigation troughs, but the Pachomians were not the Art Girls. Only Pippi exhibited either inclination or aptitude. The racing program quickly petered out, though not before Maria Deux scolded him in front of everyone for christening his stupid slat of wood The Little Blessed Virgin.

Speaking of Pippi’s aptitude, the fact that her role as the convent’s handyperson was never challenged by Switters disappointed those who had believed that in inviting him to stay, they would be getting “a man around the house,” a Mr. Fix-It but his serious lack of dexterity didn’t bother Pippi. Proud of her minor skills in carpentry and simple mechanics, she was protective of her domain. The Marias, however, were appalled, and Bob muttered once that it was no wonder that Fannie had fled. Not everybody got Bob’s meaning.

Bob had taken over Fannie’s duties as goatherd and chicken mistress, which left Maria Une a bit shorthanded in the kitchen. ZuZu mopped his room once a week, and either she or Mustang Sally delivered the pitchers of water with which he must constantly rehydrate himself in the Syrian summer, and the pails of water he must use to bathe. Since he elected not to attend chapel, he saw the six undernuns primarily at meals, although, of course, he glimpsed them going about their various chores as he stilted to and from his office. Beneath their placid, reverent, industrious exteriors, he began to sense an undercurrent of skittishness, almost a controlled hysteria, but he reasoned, correctly as it turned out, that it had nothing to do with him.

Despite his shortcomings in the areas of maintenance and religion, they seemed generally unresentful of his presence among them, finding him, well, novel, if not actually entertaining. At least, he didn’t exacerbate their ingrained fear of maleness. (Was it not just such a fear that had led them to marry the mild and distant Christ, the one male figure who never would threaten them with brutish strength or callous sexuality?) Masked Beauty once referred to Switters as their monstre sacré, and among themselves that had become their pet name for him. When Mustang Sally ventured that as far as she could tell, he was neither monstrous nor sacred, Domino, in perfect imitation of his tone and his demeanor, had grinned and said, “I wouldn’t be too sure about that.”

As for Domino, his relationship with her had changed since the Fannie affair, but it was a subtle change. Had Fannie not fled, things might have gone more as Bobby had predicted, there might have been in her attitude a discernible measure of jealousy or scorn. As it was, she was aloof from him to such a smallish degree that he was forced periodically to suspect that he only imagined it. At no time was she unfriendly. On the other hand, at no time did she show up at his door again with flowers behind her ear.

During the first month of his residency, Domino had prayed over him quite a bit. A few times she succeeded in coaxing him to pray with her. He was sincere and respectful during their prayerful duets but also noticeably ill at ease. By late June, the exorcism instructions she’d requested from Sicilian Catholic sources had arrived via e-mail. On three successive Sunday evenings, after fasting all day, she had positioned and lit the prescribed number of candles, laid her hands on his head in the prescribed manner, and chanted the prescribed incantations. They were impressive little ceremonies (his favorite part was when she took his head in her hands), but since at their conclusion he refused to test the results, they were destined to be inconclusive. Goodness knows he wanted to please her, almost as much as he wanted the taboo dispelled, yet he had only to aim a trembling toe toward the ground than the stricken image of R. Potney Smithe flooded his brainpan, prompting a hasty, apologetic withdrawal. Frustrated, though sympathetic, Domino canceled further exorcisms and soon broke off the prayer sessions as well. He saw less of her after that.

His summer was spent most often in the company of Masked Beauty. For hours each morning, the abbess joined him in his baked little office, where they cooled themselves with tea and palm-frond fans, where he regained a level of fluency in French, and where the two of them gradually reached a level of comfort with the mask beneath the veil. It was such a nuisance raising the veil every time she took a sip of tea that after a week she’d asked his permission to bare her face. Of course, he assured her that it was fine, yet if “fine” meant that the wart was incapable of distracting him, that he was oblivious to it, or that he would ever become really used to it, then he had misspoken. Every Tuesday night, when the song, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Your Face” from My Fair Lady resounded in the dining hall, he couldn’t help but think, Henry Higgins would be singing a different tune if he’d hooked up with Masked Beauty.

Considering that in every other aspect she was as handsome as a person of her advanced age might hope to be, one would think that her little gift from God could be overlooked. It could not. It was the monstre sacré, a magical beast. He tried to compare it to the third eye of an Asian saint, but the wart was as blind as a mole rat and twice as ugly. Both repelling and compelling, it was charged with the grisly charisma of a serial killer. In its globby piled-on redness, it was a scarlet letter embroidered by an obsessive compulsive. And it was too damn vivid.

Nevertheless, they each made a certain peace with its imposition. He refused to allow the wart to unsettle him, she refused to brood over whether he might possibly be unsettled. Thus, they proceeded with their objectives.

“This little bastard operates on solar batteries, the likes of which are unknown to the civilian population. When you get your conventional desktop PC—and I wish we had one now because it’d be a lot easier to teach you on—you’ll either have to run your generator during daylight hours or else, if you choose to go DC, charge its batteries almost every night. Burn more fossil fuel, in any case, I’m afraid. The dinosaurs died so that chat rooms might flourish.”

Masked Beauty nodded. She didn’t exactly take to cyberspace like a duck to orange sauce. Switters attributed this to her background rather than to her age. Look at Maestra, after all. As the weeks dragged dryly by, the abbess learned little more than how to boot up and shut down. One problem was that she could barely type. When there was a lengthy e-mail to transmit, Switters functioned as a stenographer, taking her dictation directly on the keyboard. A couple of things prevented him from becoming so bored that he unleashed his imp: one, the realization that it was Matisse’s blue nude for whom he was clerking; and two, the delight he took in imagining the look on Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald’s steely face every time Langley intercepted another missive from Switters’s address clamoring for papal reforms and advocating global birth control. And, ha-ha, what about those exorcism instructions?

Soon, however, it seemed that less and less of their time was devoted to e-mail and more and more to searching the Internet. The subject of their search was Mary aka Miriam aka Maria aka Marian aka the Blessed Holy Virgin Mother of God, the legendary Jewess whose maidenhead was alleged to have remained unpopped, sound as a dollar, even after she gave birth to a seven-pound baby boy.

In one of their earliest conversations, Domino had disclosed to Switters that the Pachomians were busily redefining their relationship to their religion: to Jesus, to Mary, and to God. Working now with Masked Beauty, it was clear to him that, for the present, their central focus was on Mary. Since Mary was mentioned in the Bible no more than a dozen times, and then mostly in passing, and since she was paid little or no attention in the first four hundred years of the Church’s existence, any material upon which one might base a reevaluation of her was comparatively recent. That didn’t mean that such material was scarce. Oh, no. Enough had been written about her—an astonishingly huge amount in the late twentieth century—to fill every boxcar on the Bethlehem, Golgotha & Santa Fe Railroad. If one aspect of the material interested the abbess more than any other, she did not let on.

It was slow going. For reasons of both portability and government security, the sophisticated little computer lacked a printer. Switters read aloud the data off the screen—often struggling to translate as he read, for the majority of it was in English or Italian—and Masked Beauty wrote it down in French and by hand. Following their afternoon siestas, she and Domino would go over the longhand “printouts,” and several evenings a week, the entire sisterhood would gather for group discussions centered around the gleaned information. Switters would have liked to have been included in those discussions, if for no other reason than to blow the gunk out of his intellectual carburetor and to keep his discursive spark plugs clean. It was a long, long way from the C.R.A.F.T. Club, but, hey, a fully conscious man was an adaptable man.

When the Mary material concerned, as it increasingly did, one or more of the Virgin’s alleged modern apparitions, he was especially keen on joining the conversations. For better or worse, he’d trod the electronic road to Fatima before, and he very well might have something to contribute. (Remembering that Suzy had not even sent him a copy of her paper, a thin sheen of hurt lacquered his so-called fierce, hypnotic green eyes, only to instantly evaporate in the arid air. He couldn’t blame her. Suzy’s generation was unforgiving of dishonesty, and rightly so. Alas, it remained rather blissfully unaware that it was being lied to by corporate America—through the movies, TV shows, and magazines it so adored—a hundred times a day, but that’s another story.) Alas, again, no invitation to participate in the dialogues appeared forthcoming. Whether out of their exclusiveness or consideration for his own privacy, the doors to their meetings were closed to him.

Then, late one night at the burnt end of August, as the happy ghosts of long-deceased Bedouins rode the gritty desert winds (because they in life possessed the wisdom of physical nonattachment, nomads enjoyed an unusually smooth transition into death and made the world’s most contented ghosts), he discovered himself in unexpected and unusual discourse, the consequences of which were to be considerable.

It was well past midnight when he heard the bell. The bell ding-donged him out of a dream in which red-eye gravy played a prominent role. (Could it be that he’d munched one too many cucumbers, chewed a few too many chickpeas?) After the first four or five rings, he was alert; after the next four or five, he was on his stilts. He stood at the door, which had been left ajar to facilitate a nighttime stirring of day-parched air. There was more ringing, followed by male voices from outside the compound, followed by female voices from within. The male voices sounded angry, the female voices alarmed. Switters unzipped the crocodile valise. Mr. Beretta! Rise and shine!

Before he could pull on his trousers, there was a burst of automatic gunfire. In a flash, he was through the door, stilt-sprinting along a moonlit path in his boxer shorts. The ones with the baby ducks on them.

Something brighter than blood sang in his arteries. It climbed up his spine like the high notes of an anthem, clarifying his lungs, teasing his muscles and making them brisk. It wasn’t a syrup of wahoo, really: it wasn’t pure enough for that. Mostly, it was good old retro primal adrenaline, concocted in the fight-or-flight kitchen, the reptile house of the brain. But there were drops of wahoo in it. Had he said otherwise, he would have been untruthful.

He hadn’t gotten far before he met Domino. She’d been running to his room to get him. “For the gate,” she gasped. “They are demanding it open.”

“Yeah, I can hear that. Although their French really sucks.” He resumed his sprint. “And I have to say your English isn’t much better.”

“Switters! . . .” She was trying to keep up with him.

“It’s okay, darling. It’s just because you’re excited.”

Domino looked at him as if he were completely demented. “This is serious!” she cried.

“Ah, yes,” he agreed. She could have sworn his tone was sarcastic, or at least facetious.

By then, they had reached the gate. All of the sisters, with the exception of Masked Beauty, were gathered there. A couple of them had their hands clasped, apparently in prayer, but they were amazingly calm and composed. On the other side of the thick mud wall, men were shouting in broken French. They were saying that the oasis was a holy garden of Allah that had been desecrated by handmaidens of the great Western Satan. “Ah, yes,” muttered Switters again. This time, his voice had overtones of boredom and weariness. “Infidels!” the men screamed repeatedly. There was another savage spurt of gunfire. Switters yelled to the women to take cover, although he realized that the bullets, for the moment, were being sprayed in the air.

“They’re drunk,” whispered Domino, who was crouched at his side.

“Yeah, but not on arrack. Help me onto these stilts.” He was transferring to the taller pair that Pippi kept at the gate.

“Killer-B stuff?” she suggested, steadying the poles.

He grinned at her approvingly and nodded. “That’s some toxic honey. Blind a man and make him crazy.”

“Do be careful.”

Leaning the stilts and his body against the gate so that his hands would be free, he slid open the grate and stared down on the men, who raised their rifles and stepped back a few feet to stare up at him. There were only three of them. They had sounded like more. Dressed in cheap civilian khakis and those red-and-white checkered headdresses that always looked as if they’d been yanked off tabletops in a suburban spaghetti parlor (“They’ve copped our Italian night!” he wanted to yell to Pippi), the men had arrived in a dented old Peugeot sedan.

He greeted them in polite Arabic, and it would have been difficult to determine which had surprised them more, his language (it was an extended greeting and as flowery as the finest Arabic often can be) or his sex. The fact that the moon was illuminating—and the grate framing—a grin spiked with strife-torn teeth, a pair of gleaming f.h.g. eyes, and the barrel of a most capable-looking handgun, must also have contributed to their astonishment.

After a period of rather stunned silence, the men all began to clamor at the same time. Speaking Arabic now, one asked what kind of man would live in a nest of unclean women, another demanded to know what a foreigner was doing speaking in the tongue of great Allah, and the third inquired if Switters was prepared for death.

To the first question, he replied, “A lucky man”; to the second, “It’s as stupidly ethnocentric to think God’s language is Arabic as it is to believe Jesus spoke King James English”; and to the last, “Everybody on earth, unfortunately, is prepared for death, but very damn few are prepared for life.” The eloquence of his Arabic surprised even him: he must have chipped the rust off when traveling with the Kurds and Bedouins. While the attackers were quietly jabbering among themselves about his replies, he interrupted to ask if they might tell him a joke.

His request bewildered them—and rekindled their hostility. “Tell you a joke? Do you think this is a funny matter?”

“Hey, it’s written in the Koran that the gates of Paradise open wide for he who can make his companions laugh.” He quoted the chapter and verse, challenging them to look it up. “I was wondering if you boys might be among those favored by Heaven.”

That threw them into a state of consternation. For a good three or four minutes, they conferred with one another, occasionally scratching their kaffiyehs with their rifles, as if trying to remember a punch line. Finally, the eldest of the trio (all under thirty) stepped forward and announced, “It is irrelevant to Heaven whether or not we can make you laugh because you are not our companion.”

Well, that was reasonable enough, and he told them so. “You fellows aren’t as dumb as I originally believed.” At this, they seemed oddly pleased. Then, again listing chapter and verse, he brought up Mohammed’s prohibition against priests, asking them why, since the Koran clearly stated that each individual must approach God singularly and alone, had modern Islam spawned such an authoritarian hierarchy of ayatollahs, imams, and mullahs.

This time, their consultation was more brief. “These exalted authorities to whom you refer,” the spokesman said, “are not priests but scholars.” He stepped back rather smugly, confident that he’d had the final word, unaware that he was dealing with Switters.

Though Switters didn’t know the Arabic for semantics, he, nevertheless, got his point across. “They can call themselves ‘scholars’ until the camels come home,” he said, “but the truth is, they function as priests and bishops and cardinals, and you know they do. They intercede between a man and Allah.”

All four of them bantered about that for a while, making a lot of fuss but getting nowhere, until Switters eventually said, “Show me, if you can, where it says in the Koran that a devout Muslim has the duty or the right to kill those who don’t believe as he does. Show me where Mohammed sanctions the murder of those of another faith—or no faith at all—and I’ll unbolt this gate and let you in to bravely slaughter these unarmed women.” When there was no immediate response, he added, “It is not the Prophet who advocates violent behavior but ambitious ayatollahs, and the politicians who share their vested interests.”

Of course, the men could not refute him with scripture, as the Koran was on Switters’s side, but they argued with him, bringing up such things as the Israeli displacement of Palestinians and the murderous legacy of the Christian Crusaders, neither of which he was wont to defend in the slightest. In fact, he seconded everything they said about the Crusades, plainly exhibiting his own disgust and revulsion, yet refusing to accept any residual guilt, claiming that it had nothing to do with him or them. He understood, however, that Arabic peoples had a different sense of time, of history, than a Westerner such as himself; had, like the Kandakandero, a different relationship with the past and their ancestors.

After that, the discussion cooled down. The night was cooling down as well, and on the ground behind him, the ex-nuns were beginning to shiver in their thin cotton gowns. The talk continued, though, for at least another two hours, during which many cross-cultural theological issues were fairly evenly debated. In the end, the attackers, drained and a trifle flabbergasted by the encounter, made as if to depart. Just to make sure, to cap the melting sundae with a tangy cherry, Switters announced that the compound was under the personal aegis of President Hafez al-Assad, Audubon Poe, and Pee-wee Herman, and if any harm came to its occupants, heads would roll all the way to Mecca. “Take it up with those worthy gentlemen if you have any doubts. Tell them Switters sent you.”

The men nodded gravely. Then, following an exchange of formal, fairly cordial farewells, they climbed into the Peugeot, which, suspensefully, took as long to start as a barrio limo, and drove off into the sands.

“Oh, goody! My trusty starship.”

At some juncture during the seemingly interminable bull session, Domino had slipped away to his room and fetched his wheelchair. Now, he dropped onto it. Once he was seated, the sisters, cold, frazzled, some very nearly asleep on their feet, crowded around him as if he were a conquering hero. Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates?

“Magnifique!” exclaimed Masked Beauty. The abbess had shown up at the gate soon after the engagement began and, having acquired a rudimentary familiarity with Arabic as long ago as her service in Algeria, translated for the others, as best she could, the highlights of the debate. She had arrived veiled, in the event that she had to confront strangers, but had removed the cloth now, and it dangled from her fingers. A ray of moonlight striking her double-decker wart made the growth resemble a dab of ketchup-coated curds. Cottage cheese with ketchup, he thought. Richard Nixon’s favorite meal. Probably got the recipe from John Foster Dulles. Patooie!

“How do you know so well Islam?” the abbess asked.

“Oh, I used to flip through the Koran—and the Bible—and the Talmud—occasionally,” he said. “Before I discovered Finnegans Wake.”

Thanking and congratulating him again, Masked Beauty patted his curly top. Then, shooing her charges ahead of her like geese, she, and they, went off to bed. Domino stayed behind, however, intent on pushing his chair. “I don’t believe I can sleep,” she said, “but you must be exhausted.” He claimed that he was as buzzed as a June bug up a maypole, so they repaired to his room for a spot of cold tea. It was the first time she had visited him there since the Fannie affair at the beginning of summer. She stood with her back to him while he pulled on a shirt and trousers. Baby ducks, adieu.

When they were settled, he in his Invacare, she on the stool (the cot was avoided as deliberately, as warily, as if it were an altar upon which certain arcane, unmentionable rituals were known to have occurred), she told him how grateful she was that the incident at the gate had concluded without bloodshed. He said that no self-respecting cowboy would have let such a splendid opportunity to fire his gun pass him by, but that he supposed a peaceful solution was best for all concerned. “Those agitated stooges probably have innocent kids to support.”

“It’s their religion,” she said accusingly.

He corrected her. “It’s their religion plus your religion.”

“Our lives were threatened, and you are saying that my religion must share the blame? What have we done?”

He sighed. “You’ve tried to own God,” he said. “Just like them.”

Domino looked puzzled. Then she nodded. “Okay, I think I see what you mean. The Moslems and the Christians are each insisting that their way to God is the only way, so if only one side is right, then those on the other side . . .”

“Having hocked their lives, are left to face death without the pawn ticket. That smarts. And remember: there’re three sides to every story, including the monotheism story.”

She curtly dismissed the Jews, however, stating that Judaism’s Killer B’s wouldn’t figure into the final equation. Before he could challenge that assertion—and, really, all he was wanting to do was to settle back and unwind—she asked what the name Fatima meant to him.

“It’s the podunk burg in Portugal where that most profoundly splendid of oxymorons, the Virgin Mother, supposedly yo-yoed the sun in 1917.” One didn’t play cyberspace errand boy for Marian enthusiasts of all ages without picking up a tidbit or two. “Fatima, Lourdes, Bosnia; Knock, Ireland; Tepeyac, Mexico. Isn’t it fascinating how Mary usually seems to turn up in ugly, boring, economically depressed locales in dire need of a tourist attraction? Projecting, we could forecast that she’ll show up next—where? Western Oklahoma, probably. Middle of Saskatchewan. Except that those places don’t have enough Catholics on site to organize a fish fry.”

Ignoring his sarcasm, she said, “Fatima was also the name of Mohammed’s daughter.”

“Yeah, you’re right. The Prophet’s favored offspring. That hadn’t occurred to me.”

“So, the question is: are they connected? These two Fatimas?”

“Everything is connected. But the links can sometimes be hard to uncover.” He took a gulp of tea. She took a sip. Outside, a rooster crowed. It sounded like a spastic adolescent trying to imitate Tarzan. “Too bad roosters aren’t more like parrots,” he said. “We could train them to crow inspiring things like, ‘People of the world, relax!’ instead of kicking off our day with a lot of cock-a-doodle-do.”

Domino smiled in spite of herself. “Oh, you Switters. I don’t know whether you are a virtue or a vice.”

“Neither do I, but why does it have to be one or the other? Why, for that matter, can’t we be simultaneously monotheistic and polytheistic?”

“Ugh! Polytheism? Ooh-la-la! All that noisy jumble of gods hiding in tree trunks and chimney hearths, with necklaces of skulls and more arms than a granddaddy spider. Abominable!”

“They tend to teem, all right, but overlooking the fact that some of them are too damn vivid, couldn’t we just accept them as various aspects of the one God, who’s an eternal, absolute mystery and can never be pinned down or accurately described, anyway?” He gulped the last of the tea. “If a person is truly devout, why couldn’t they be both a Christian and a Moslem? And a Jew? Don’t look at me like I’m a naive ninny. They all rolled out of the same pasture. Ol’ Abraham and his peevish herdsmen buddies—cowboys, now that I think of it—inventing the one-god-our-god-and-he-be-a-bruiser concept as a response to and a rebellion against the sexual superiority of women.”

“I might have known you’d bring sex into it sooner or later.”

“If you have a problem with the sexual complexion of the universe, take it up with Mother Nature. I’m just one of her baby boys.”

The rooster sang an encore. Then, another. But so far no single photon of dawnlight had squirmed through the curtain threads. “If women had played an active role in shaping our relationship to God, everything might be different,” she said. “There might not be a conflict between the Church and Islam.”

“There might not be any Church and Islam,” he interjected. “Women wouldn’t have seen the need for them.”

“As it is. . . .” She sighed and shrugged. After a pause, she said, “Despite what I know and you do not, I’m unwilling to concede defeat—or switch sides.” She rose and smoothed out her dress. Evidently she’d pulled it on in a hurry when the disturbance had awakened her: he could tell she was bereft of underwear. Her nipples pushed against the cotton like urchins pressing their noses against a candy store window. In the candleshine, her pubis was faintly outlined, like a map of a phantom peninsula. He considered it wise that she leave, but since the conversation had taken the turn that it had, he felt he simply had to ask:

“Have you never heard of the neutral angels?”

Suppose the neutral angels were able to talk Yahweh and Lucifer—God and Satan, to use their popular titles—into settling out of court. What would be the terms of the compromise? Specifically, how would they divide the assets of their earthly kingdom?

Would God be satisfied to take loaves and fishes and itty-bitty thimbles of Communion wine, while allowing Satan to have the red-eye gravy, eighteen-ounce New York steaks, and buckets of chilled champagne? Would God really accept twice-a-month lovemaking for procreative purposes and give Satan the all-night, no-holds-barred, nasty “can’t-get-enough-of-you” hot-as-hell fucks?

Think about it. Would Satan get New Orleans, Bangkok, and the French Riviera and God get Salt Lake City? Satan get ice hockey, God get horseshoes? God get bingo; Satan, stud poker? Satan get LSD; God, Prozac? God get Neil Simon; Satan, Oscar Wilde?

Can anyone see Satan taking pirate radio stations and God being happy with the likes of CBS? God getting twin beds; Satan, waterbeds; God, Minnie Mouse, John Wayne, and Shirley Temple; Satan, Betty Boop, Peter Lorre, and Mae West; God, Billy Graham; Satan, the Dalai Lama? Would Satan get Harley motorcycles; God, Honda golf carts? Satan get blue jeans and fish-net stockings; God, polyester suits and pantyhose? Satan get electric guitars; God, pipe organs; Satan get Andy Warhol and James Joyce; God, Andrew Wyeth and James Michener; God, the 700 Club; Satan, the C.R.A.F.T. Club; Satan, oriental rugs; God, shag carpeting? Would God settle for cash and let Satan leave town with Mr. Plastic? Would Satan mambo and God waltz?

Would Almighty God be that dorky? Or would he see rather quickly that Satan was making off with most of the really interesting stuff? More than likely he would. More than likely, God would holler, “Whoa! Wait just a minute here, Lucifer. I’ll take the pool halls and juke joints, you take the church basements and Boy Scout jamborees. You handle content for a change, pal. I’m going to take—style!”

Because Bobby Case had convinced him that any neutral angel worthy of the name would have recognized that Yahweh and Lucifer could no more be truly separated than the two sides of a coin (they needed each other for balance, for completion, for their identity, for their survival—which may have been why the more reflective of the angels had elected to remain neutral in the first place), Switters reserved speculative rants such as the preceding for his private entertainment (except, of course, when circumstance and/or magnitude of substance abuse dictated otherwise). Therefore, he treated Domino to a factual, relatively straightforward presentation of the neutral angel information as it had survived in Levantine folklore and biblical allusion (often the same thing) for four thousand years. Domino was incredulous, but rather than dismissing the story out of hand, agreed to ponder it and to investigate it with what resources she had at her disposal. “That’s funny,” she said, and she smiled that special smile of hers that was such a perfect blend of unintentional cynicism and warmest charity. “Not long ago, I would have said that I would pray over it.” She paused. She wrinkled her brow in a way that caused a third of it to disappear. “Switters, are you ever, on your own, inclined toward prayer?”

He barely hesitated. “When I feel I’m in need of shark repellent, I try to pray. When I feel I’m in need of smelling salts, I try to meditate. I’m not saying that one’s necessarily superior to the other—both are capable of being reduced to a kind of metaphysical panhandling—but if more people smelled the salts and woke the hell up, they’d find they wouldn’t need to be fretting about sharks all the time.”

“And what about Serpents?”

He grinned. “You mean the Snake in the garden? The Snake is good, Domino. The Snake is smelling salts on a rope.”

Before either of them could prepare for it, she stepped to his wheelchair, bent over—loose breasts bobbing like turtles on a buckboard, hair swinging around to eclipse her moonish cheeks—and kissed him quite emphatically on the bridge of his nose.

“I like you in a way that is too unusual,” she whispered.

“The feeling is mutual,” he said.

Then the rooster crowed her out the door. As he listened to her footsteps disappearing, crunchily, down the sandy path, he thought he overheard the slick voice of Satan. And Satan, in this aural hallucination, was saying, “Okay, Yahweh, here’s a proposition for you: why don’t you take the world’s bargirls under your wing and let me have a turn with the nuns?”

In the annals of Switters lore, the diurnal interval following the aborted terrorist attack would be forever known as the Day of the Hiccuping Jackass.

It may or may not have been an omen, but the day began with Switters awakening late to discover that he had the wrong pair of stilts by his cot. Domino had placed the poles across his lap prior to wheeling him back to his room, and at the time neither he nor she had noticed (the moon had set, and they were both a bit groggy) that it was Pippi’s original, tall pair she’d retrieved and not the customized, two-inches-above-the-ground stilts, the ones he’d designed to provide an ambulatory state of ersatz enlightenment. Oh, well, he thought, these might be fun for a change, so he stork-walked to the office on stilts that put his unbreakfasted mouth at fig level, higher than the ripe lemons that dangled from their branches like bare lightbulbs in a nineteenth-century shoe factory.

Masked Beauty had slept late, as well, and she arrived at the office only moments before Switters. She greeted him with fresh tea and fresh compliments on his handling of the previous night’s situation. Then she announced that she had had quite enough Marian material for the time being and she wanted him to begin searching the Net for information about Islam. It wasn’t mainstream Islam in which she was interested, she was well versed in that, but the more esoteric doctrines.

Switters studied her, fighting to keep his focus off the wart. “Expecting more trouble?” he asked.

“No, no. The nearest village is in the hills, thirty kilometers away over rough terrain. Men do not come here easily. The Syrians in general are sympathetic people, nice people. It is only the Muslim Brotherhood that makes the problem for Christians, but, then, fundamentalists are the same everywhere, are they not?”

“Yeah. Their desperate craving for simplicity sure can create complications. And their pitiful longing for certainty sure can make things unsteady.”

“I imagine that word somehow has spread about our excommunication, and that has inflamed those who are already disposed toward fanatical piety.”

“Maybe, but I saw on the Net that the U.S. military recently retaliated against terrorist operations in Sudan and Afghanistan, and you can bet that’s put a bee up many a djellabah. Good thing our visitors mistook me for a Frenchman.”

“A mistake no Frenchman would ever make,” she said, referring both to his accent and his grammar. “Now, what I wish to investigate is—”

The abbess was interrupted by a knock, and they glanced up to see Bob standing in the open doorway, wearing an expression that was almost as fritzed as her hair. Generally, Bob appeared as if she’d been sired by one of the Marx Brothers—perhaps all four—and now she was alternating between looks of sheepish contrition, like Harpo after striking a sour note on his instrument of choice; popeyed incredulity, like Chico watching the diva disgorge the aria in A Night at the Opera; waggy disgust, like Groucho learning that his best jokes had once again been eviscerated by network censors; and peevish indignation, like Zeppo sensing that it was his fate to be perpetually upstaged by his three siblings.

Bob apologized profusely for the interruption, but, mon Dieu, she hadn’t asked to be put in charge of livestock, she wasn’t a farmgirl, if only Fannie had fared better at the hands of some she could name; but Fannie had fled, and what was she, Bob, supposed to do in such a crisis, et cetera, et cetera. Masked Beauty calmed her with reassuring clucks and waves of her veil, and eventually they drew from Bob the source of her fluster. It seemed that the donkey had hiccups. Had had them for forty-eight hours, give or take an hour. Bob kept thinking they’d go away, as her own hiccuping always had, but they’d persisted, maybe even worsened, and the poor dumb creature couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, was becoming unsteady and weak, and if something wasn’t done, surely it would hiccup itself to death.

As Bob appealed to Masked Beauty, Masked Beauty appealed to Switters, and Switters, without stopping to consider how it might come across in French, said, “People of the world, relax. I’ll give it a shot.”

First, he stilted over to the little stableyard, where the donkey was tethered. Sure enough, the beast was racked with spasms. They were occurring about every other second, and each time its diaphragm contracted, its skinny sides would inflate and deflate, as if it had strayed into the product inspection line at a whoopee cushion factory, forcing from its epiglottis a jerky sound somewhere between a cough, a sneeze, a fairy choking on fairy dust, and a socially prominent dowager trying to stifle a belch. Repeatedly the donkey’s donkey larynx was issuing the first quarter-note of a bray, a hee-haw from which the haw and most of the hee had been scrunched and extinguished.

“Pathological,” muttered Switters, surveying the scene with a mixture of pity and revulsion. Then, gathering his wits, he sent Bob to the kitchen for sugar. “Tell Maria Une I want . . .” He surveyed the animal. “Tell her I’ll need most of a small sack. You know: at least a kilo.” Next, he dispatched Pippi (who’d come over from her shop to see what was the matter) to fetch a pail of water.

When the sisters returned (Bob was followed by Maria Une, who was demanding to know what was to become of her precious sweetener), Switters spilled the sugar into the water bucket and stirred it with a rake handle. He set the solution under the donkey’s convulsive muzzle, but the beast was too distressed to take more than a few laps of it. They waited. The donkey hicced, then lapped again. It obviously liked the taste but simply couldn’t consume the mixture with enough speed or in sufficient quantity for it to be therapeutically effective. “Okay, Bob, you restrain the noble jackass. Pippi, prepare to pour.”

With that, Switters destilted onto the scrawny back, straddling it as though he were Don Quixote about to ride into war. “Bring on the windmills!” he yelled, as he grasped the slobbery muzzle, top and bottom, and pried the greenish-yellow teeth apart. “Whew! I’m a model of dental elegance compared to you, buckaroo. Come on, Pippi, pour. Pour!”

“Assez?”

“No. More. The whole damn bucket. But not so fast, you don’t want to drown the thing.”

The donkey was struggling mightily, causing Switters, atop it, to resemble a rodeo clown, but they eventually succeeded in emptying most of the sugar water down the creature’s gullet. Masked Beauty held the stilts for Switters, and, with considerable difficulty, he transferred onto them. The little ass was braying now, genuinely braying, and retching as if it might spew out every drop with which they’d flooded its tank. In a minute or two, however, it settled down, seeming dimly to notice that its demon had been exorcised. The humans, too, noticed that the hiccuping had ceased, and as the healed patient squeezed its head into the bucket to lick up residual sugar, they applauded.

Joining in the applause was Domino, who had come upon the scene about the time that Switters was mounting his spasmodic steed.

“Incroyable!” she called. “Do your talents have no end?” She was abeam with mock adulation.

Shuffling the poles, he hopped awkwardly around to face her. “Switters,” he growled, as if, with gruff modesty, introducing himself. “Errand boy, acquired taste; roving goodwill ambassador for the Redhook Brewing Company, Seattle, Washington; and”—doffing his hat, he attempted a courtly bow, an exercise not easily performed on stilts—”large-animal veterinarian.”

(Sometime, perhaps that evening at dinner, he would confess that his grandmother had taught him the hiccup remedy. Was it before or after she taught him to cure childhood moodiness with Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, and Big Mama Thornton? He couldn’t remember.)

Whether disposed to savor the passing moment or with a view toward advancing himself further in Domino’s good graces, he swept his hat in an ironic parody of a knightly gesture, as though, with ostentatious ceremony, he was dedicating his triumph to her, his lady. His backside happened to be to the donkey—rather too close to the donkey for the donkey’s liking—and at that exact, fastuous instant, the ungrateful creature lashed out with its hind legs, one of its hooves kicking thin air but the other dealing Switters’s right stilt a blow that sent him flying.

Domino dove forward to catch him. She underestimated his momentum, however, and they both ended up on the ground, he on top of her. She was flat on her back. He lay facedown, his manly jut of a chin resting just above her darling little jut of a nose. In that uneven alignment, their eyes could not meet, so he stared for a few seconds, while recovering his wind, at the rocky soil just beyond the crown of her head. “Are you okay?” he asked, afraid to move a muscle.

“Oui. Yeah. Ooh-la-la!” She laughed nervously. “I was trying to keep your feet from touching the earth.”

And she had. The toes of his sneakers rested upon her shins.

“So!” he said. “You do believe in the curse.”

Still not moving, he could feel her half-face flushing beneath his half-face. He could also feel her body, flattened and yet somehow buoyant, under the weight of his body. She was as soft as a marshmallow bunny, he thought, yet simultaneously as firm as a futon. Most of the words that she stammered about her action being intended only for his peace of mind were lost in the folds of his throat—and in the concerned chatter of those Pachomians who’d clustered around them.

It was at about that point—and no more than ten seconds had passed—that he became aware of his pen of regeneration and of the red ink rushing into its inkwell. It was positioned against her belly, not far from where the concave yolk of her umbilicus simmered in its downy poacher, and an equal distance, more or less, from that vital area and favored masculine destination that is known in the Basque language (Switters could verify this) as the emabide and sometimes as the ematutu. Whatever the proximities, and no matter what it was called in Basque, Switters’s rod of engenderment was growing more rigid, more perpendicular, by the moment; was behaving, in fact, like a hydraulic jack, threatening, he imagined, to lift him right off her, suspending him above her prone body as if he were a plate on a shaft, a bobbin balanced on a spindle.

Domino had round cheeks. She had the kind of nice round cheeks that made a person want to press one of their own cheeks against one of hers, to hold it there, slide it around a bit, the way an affectionate mother might lay a cheek against her baby’s bare bottom, or a boy put his cheek to a cold, ripe cantaloupe, sniffing its lush, musky fruitiness out of the corner of his nostrils. Domino had those kind of cheeks, and Switters admittedly had sometimes had that kind of reaction to them, but, naturally, had never yielded to the temptation, nor, alas, could he really yield to it now, despite this unusual opportunity, for his cheeks had landed a few inches to the north of her cheeks, and cheek-to-cheek congruency could be attained only were he to slide downward, a southerly migration that, to phrase it crudely, would have put the carrot dangerously close to the rabbit hole.

As it was, he was pronged against her lower abdomen in such a spring-loaded fashion that he could feature himself, without use of hands or feet, vaulting over the henhouse. Undoubtedly, she was aware of the protuberance—she was practically run through by it: nun on a stick—and that awareness must account for the fact that she was silent, tense, and seemed to be holding her breath. As his own embarrassment turned gradually to panic, he rejected the notion of trying to collapse the bulb by mentally picturing radically anti-erotic images (his mother with the stomach flu, for example, or a Pomeranian humping a sofa leg) and, instead, dug the heels of his hands into the earth and flipped himself off her, onto his back. His talents had no end?

Gasping slightly from the effort, he lay there beside her with his feet in the air, looking like an advertisement for an aerosol insecticide. (Of course, a dead bug wouldn’t be sporting an erection. Or would it? Hanged men are reputed to be so affected, why not a zapped beetle? Perhaps there was a reason why they were called “cockroaches.” And think of the Spanish fly.)

The sisters assisted Domino to an upright position, whereupon she brusquely brushed off her blue chador (which is what Syrian women called their long cotton gowns), and retreated, muttering that there were important matters that required her immediate attention. The others then attempted to hoist Switters back onto his stilts, but the ex-linebacker’s bulk was too much for them. Bob, understandably grateful, and seemingly oblivious to the accidental subtext of his topple onto Domino, volunteered to go fetch his wheelchair. “Merci, Madame Bob,” he said weakly.

For the nearly ten minutes that it took Bob to return with the chair, he lay there like a yogi in the dead-bug asana, growing slowly flaccid; shielding his eyes from the pulsating radiation of a sun, now directly overhead, that resembled a phoenix egg laid in a campfire and impaled on a laser; and talking to his abnormally elevated feet. “Be patient, ol’ pals,” he whispered to his feet. “Please. Another month, that’s all. Then we’re hot-footing it—that’s just a figure of speech—to South-goddamn-America. And one way or another, feets, I’m gonna set you free.”

For the next couple of weeks, Domino and Switters were shy around each other. In fact, without it being overly obvious, even to themselves, and without going to any great lengths to achieve it, they were in avoidance of each other. Cloistered in the confines of an eight-acre oasis, it was, of course, impossible that their paths wouldn’t cross several times daily, but when such encounters occurred, they’d smile, exchange a polite nod or two, fidget, squirm, and hasten on their separate ways before the headless chicken—the totem bird of discomposure—could find hemorrhage space in their cheeks. Inevitably, one or the other would steal a backward glance. Switters, having been trained as a sneak, was more adept at this than she.

Their lone conversation during this period concerned the round, mud tower that rose above the compound like a silo for a Scud of manna, a missile with a warhead of milk and honey. He’d been stilting past the decrepit wooden door in the tower’s base when Domino and ZuZu exited through it, carrying pails, brooms, and mops. “Oh, hi,” said Domino, straining to sound casual. “Uh, now that we’ve finally given the tower room a cleaning, you might want to spend some time up there.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Your feet are forbidden to touch the ground.”

“That’s the story.”

“And that would include the ground floor of a building.”

“The way I interpret it.”

“Yes, but what about the floors above ground level? The third floor or the twenty-third? Wouldn’t they be safe? The same as the floor of the car or of the airplane flying above the earth.”

He tugged at his hair, which, having been trimmed by Mustang Sally that very afternoon was, for the first time in weeks, shorter in length than her own. “Good question. I’ve asked it myself on countless occasions. The answer’s in the fine print. But I can’t read the fine print, because . . .” His voice trailed off.

“Because,” she said, “there isn’t any fine print. There isn’t any large print, either.”

“It’s an unusual contract in that respect. However, I plan on renegotiating it in the very near future.”

At this reference to his impending departure, there was a slight but perceptible shift in Domino’s body language. Apparently caught somewhere between relief and regret, and wishing to display neither, she excused herself. As she marched off with her mop, she gestured at the tower top, tilting her head toward it in such a manner as to suggest without words that he at least ought to have a look up there.

Oh, yeah? Climb stairs on stilts? That would certainly promote my blood into active circulation. In the process of mentally rejecting her suggestion, he peered inside, where, as he soon noticed, there didn’t happen to be any stairs. Rather, there was a ladder: wooden, old (much too old to have been built by Pippi), barely angled, and probably thirty feet in height. Despite the fact that it looked like something devised by prehistoric pueblo daredevils, it seemed sturdy enough, and, moreover, he felt confident he could plant his feet on its rungs with impunity as far as the taboo was concerned. Nevertheless, Switters did not climb the ladder. Not that day.

Through the dry biblical whisper of the groves—past twiggy branches adangle with seed-stuffed pomegranates and under the toad-tongued leaves of almond trees—he clumped back to the office at a pace that precluded any prolonged enjoyment of arboreal shade. He was bent on reading one more time the e-mail he’d received from his grandmother that morning, the note that informed him that Suzy, having “gotten into a speck of trouble” in Sacramento, had been sent to live with Maestra for a year and would be attending the Helen Bush School in Seattle. What perplexed Switters about the note, what prompted him to keep rereading it, was that he couldn’t ascertain from its ambiguous flavor whether Maestra was encouraging him to be sure to stop by on his way to Peru or warning him to stay away from her door at all costs.

“So,” said masked Beauty. “You will be leaving us in a fortnight.”

“More or less,” Switters concurred. “The exact day depends on when the supply truck shows up.” He had the feeling that sometime during the eighteen hours since he’d happened upon Domino at the tower, the niece and her aunt had discussed the fact that his stay among them was drawing to a close.

Masked Beauty was pouring tea, the ritual with which their morning routine began. He’d already booted up and was stealing a quick glance at Maestra’s e-mail, as if overnight it might have undergone a syntagmatic rearrangement, or he, after a night’s rest, might find in it a nugget of information that had escaped his earlier scrutiny. She bent by his chair, smelling, as always, of incense and rough soap; her skin scoured, her chador as crisp as if it were a habit. She was laundered, she was regal, she was immortalized by Matisse, of whom she would seldom speak, and bewarted by God, of whom she spoke frequently, though often in a tone of bewilderment.

“Yes, the supply truck.” She sighed. “If Almighty God is not blessing soon our treasury, that truck won’t be bringing us much more petrol.” She shrugged then and smiled, and it would have been considered a smile worth admiring had it been situated at a greater distance from the mutated mushroom cap on her nose. “Ah, but dear St. Pachomius got along just fine without a generator, did he not?” It was a rhetorical question, and the abbess, in that unmodulated, childish voice of hers that was at such odds with both her brittle majesty and her brazen defect, went on to say, “In any case, Mr. Switters, I do hope your sojourn here has been in some tiny measure agreeable.”

His mood was languid, tongue still slack from the wordless joy of awakening to cuckoo calls in a sunlit cubicle far from any confines that conceivably might be labeled home, so the approval rating that she seemed to be seeking—the testimony to adequacy if not the rave review—failed to gush forth from him. Later that evening, when he had taken on as much wine as he could quietly accommodate, he would become downright gassy in his tribute, but at that lackadaisical moment, with his ears adjusting to her French, he yawned, stretched, and said only, “Beats Club Med all to hell.”

Having finished tea, they got down to business, the first order of which was the posting of e-mail to several United Nations agencies on the subject of birth control. “Now that I’ve been excommunicated, my protests lack the authority they once had,” she said. “On the other hand, I am at liberty to show less restraint.” She debated whether it was worthwhile to also e-mail Western heads of state. “The greater the population grows and the more threatening the social and environmental problems that that growth causes, it seems the more reluctant our leaders are to address the issue. Crazy, no?”

“Ever wonder,” Switters asked, “why people get so worked up over whale hunts, yet object very little to the killing of cattle? It’s because whales are rare and intelligent and untamed, whereas cows are commonplace and stupid and domesticated.” Presumably he was referring to the manner in which the powers that be, with the greedy compliance of the media and the eager assistance of evangelicals, were busily bovinizing humanity, seeking to produce a vast herd of homogenized consumers, individually expendable, docile, and, beyond basic job skills, not too smart; two-legged cows that could be easily milked and, when necessary, guiltlessly slaughtered. If that was his meaning, however, he did not belabor her with it.

“You failed to mention beautiful,” said the abbess.

“Pardon?”

“Beautiful. You, such a champion of beauty: I imagined you would claim that the whale is more revered than the cow because the whale is the more beautiful.”

“That’s, indeed, the case,” he said. “But if they weren’t so damned ubiquitous, cows also might be considered beautiful.”

“Familiarity breeds contempt?”

“Breeding breeds contempt. Beyond a certain point. The dignity of any species diminishes in direct ratio to its compulsion to teem, or to the extent that it allows teeming to be foisted upon it.”

Masked Beauty sighed another of her curtain-rustling French sighs and suggested that they commence their clicking and browsing. Obediently, he brought up Islam, then clicked on esoteric. “This morning,” she declared, “I wish to see what they have to say about the pyramids.”

“Pyramids?”

“Yes.”

“In connection to Islam? I mean, I’m sure there’s a Web site for pyramids, but . . .”

“In connection to Islam,” she insisted.

“Yeah, but I don’t believe there is a connection.” (Isn’t everything connected, Switters?)

“The pyramids are in Egypt. Egypt is an Islamic country.”

He chuckled, a bit patronizingly. “The pyramids were constructed—when?—around twenty-seven hundred B.C. Mohammed didn’t stick his nose through the fence until three thousand years later. I don’t believe—”

“Click it,” she ordered. He clicked it. And was as astonished to find himself scrolling up Islamic references to pyramids as he had been, days earlier, to discover that esoteric Islam, in opposition to the adamantly patriarchal mainstream, was decidedly feminine in character and foundation.

Islamic accounts, it turned out, gave credit for the building of the pyramids to a Levantine king called Hermanos, a name, Switters immediately reasoned, that must be a corrupted spelling of “Hermes,” the tricky Greek god of travel, speed, and esoteric adventure; the Speedy Gonzales of the ancient world, whose function was to journey beyond boundaries and frontiers, both physical and psychological; to explore the unknown and bring back to the sedentary, material and spiritual wealth. In the latter regard, Hermes was the prototype of the shaman, the precursor of Today Is Tomorrow. He was also, this inveterate voyager and con artist, a bit of a sex symbol, and crude phallic images of him were often erected at borders and crossroads. (Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates?)

In any case, King Hermanos was said to have had the original two pyramids built as mystic vaults to house the revelations and secrets of the ancient sages, a place to shelter their mysterious sciences, as well as their bodies after death. The principal treasure hidden in the underground galleries consisted of fourteen gold tablets, on seven of which were inscribed invocations to the planets, whereas on the other seven there was written a love story, a telling of the star-crossed romance between the king’s son, Salàmàn, and a teenage girl many years Salàmàn’s junior. The love story may have been symbolic, the data suggested; a kind of spiritual allegory, but it wouldn’t be incorrect to say that this material suddenly had Switters’s full attention.

Masked Beauty, on the other hand, was puzzled by their findings, disappointed, and even a bit annoyed. Switters could detect her face darkening (the wart set against it like Mars against a thick winter sky) as he read to her from the monitor how Plato had learned of the gold tablets, the Hermetic Writings so-called, and had made a pilgrimage to study them, but was prevented by the prevailing Egyptian ruler from entering the pyramids. Plato then bequeathed to his pupil, Aristotle, the task of gaining access to the secret teachings, and years later, Aristotle took advantage of Alexander the Great’s Egyptian campaign to visit a pyramid and slip inside it, using maps and codes passed on to him by Plato, but he succeeded in bringing out only one of the tablets (one on which a segment of the love story was inscribed) before “the doors were closed to him.” Masked Beauty fumed. “Ooh-la-la,” she said. “Now, I suppose I’ll have to read that damned Aristotle. Oh, I know St. Thomas Aquinas ranked him second only to Christ, but those pagan know-it-alls only give me an ache in the head.”

It’s not Aristotle that’s bugging you, thought Switters. He wondered, and not for the first time, whether she had once been enamored of old Matisse. Perhaps she didn’t relish May–December love stories barging into her theological research, uncorking memories. And/or, it could be that she was expecting more definitive results from that research.

At any rate, by the time the abbess had copied down in her kitty-whisker script all that cyberspace had coughed up regarding pyramids and esoteric Islam, she was overdue for a nap. As she gathered her notebooks and pencils, her tea things, and her veil, she announced that dinner that evening would be served a half hour later than usual. “We are first holding a special vespers,” she said. “To commemorate the birthday of Sister Domino. You are welcome to attend.”

Swiveling from the computer, where he was about to take yet another peek at the e-mail from Maestra (Suzy in “a speck of trouble”? What kind of trouble?), Switters blurted, “Today’s her birthday? September fifteenth? I wish somebody had told me. Will there be a party?”

“No, no,” Masked Beauty assured him. “Only the prayer service. Around here, a natal anniversary is an opportunity to give thanks for the gift of life, not an excuse to indulge in frivolous pleasures.”

A prohibition against birthday parties, mused Switters, who was growing a trifle weary of prohibitions. Well, well. A little something may have to be done about that.

Since, out there in the wilds, he could conceive of nothing else to give her, Switters spent the afternoon trying to compose a poem for Domino. After numerous false starts, he finally finished one, folded it, and concealed it in his breast pocket, thinking it highly improbable that he would actually present it to her. The poetic effort, in fact, so outwitted him that when it was over he felt compelled to flee the compound, slipping through the mammoth gate to stilt precariously for more than an hour over stone and sand in the ancient, clean, open desert, where the air was wavy and the sun rays strong, where everything smelled of infinity, star-ash, and ozone, and occasional gusts of scorpion-breath almost blew him off his stilts.

As he stiffly negotiated the ruined sodiums and hardened salts, he managed to step back mentally (he prided himself on periodic full consciousness) and watch himself negotiate; watch himself frankenstein along, one rigid step at a time, in the mineral heat; watch himself fret over a silly sonnet written to a nun for whom he had feelings that might not bear examination; watch himself try to interpret the Maestra-Suzy alliance and its potential implications (if any); watch himself speculate on how he was going to get out of Syria and into the Amazon so that he might petition a pointy-headed witchman to lift a taboo—and as he watched he said to himself, “Switters, methinks you may have successfully realized at least one of your childhood ambitions.” That ambition, he recalled with a dry-throated chuckle, was to avoid in every way possible an ordained and narrow life. Were he as given to self-analysis as he was to self-observation, he might have seen fit to ask if he hadn’t overshot the mark in that regard, but since, despite everything, he was feeling pretty good about being alive, the question of excess was never addressed.

Broiled pink and abraded still pinker, as if lightly chewed by the invisible teeth of eternity, he returned, panting, leg muscles aching, to the oasis, quaffed a whole pitcher of water, enjoyed a sponge bath (a washing that transcended maintenance), and then a snooze. When, refreshed and cologne splashed, he set off at last through the violet tingle—the smokeless smoke—of Syrian dusk, he was bound for supper but primed for party.

The sisters were already at table. He could hear Maria Deux’s dour voice saying grace as he approached the dining hall door. He passed the hall without entering, going instead around back to the kitchen, where in a small attached shed, a kind of pantry annex, he knew the order’s wine to be stored. The pantry door was padlocked, causing him to wonder if it had always been secured in that fashion or if special precautions had been taken as a result of his residency at the oasis.

Had he patience, a simple tool or two (a hairpin or nail file would have sufficed), and a lower ebb of spirit, he surely could have picked the lock, for, despite his imperfect dexterity, he had successfully completed the burglary course at Langley. In his present mood, however, he summarily rejected that option, returning, instead, to his room to wrest the Beretta from its crocodile-hide cocoon. Back at the pantry, he aimed the weapon at the padlock, and with a little grunt of enthusiasm (a truncated wahoo, one might reasonably categorize it), he squeezed off the rounds necessary to blow apart the lock, adding one or two more for good measure. For a split second, tiny burrs and shards of steel whizzed angrily in all directions, like metallic bees in a bug riot.

Alas, the pantry proved to contain but six bottles of wine. It was his own fault, the increased frequency of festivities from monthly Italian nights to weekly blues nights having depleted the stock. “One must make do,” he muttered philosophically, and after jamming the pistol in his waistband, he gathered up the sextet of dusty green bottles and with difficulty, due to the manner in which a burden of almost any size could create an imbalance for a stiltwalker, tottered off to the dining hall.

The sisters had left the table and were bunched in the doorway, Domino out in front like the leader of the pack. He realized then that the gunshots had frightened them: they probably imagined themselves under another terrorist attack. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to give you a scare. Firearms are to Americans what fine food and drink are to the French: can’t hold a proper celebration without them.” He treated the women to his sweetest, most luminous grin. “And we do, I understand, have something to celebrate this evening.” He swung the grin like a searchlight, narrowing its beam on Domino. “Pippi, please relieve me of this libationary freight—and uncork it, if you would, so that it might inhale, to salubrious effect, nature’s precious oxygens.” Nearly toppling over in the process, he thrust the bottles upon the redhead and then clomped off to fetch his computer cum disk player. “Don’t lament,” he called. “Our separation will be most endurably brief.”

True to his word, he was back in minutes, though he did not sit with them until he had unleashed Frank Zappa’s atonal, polyphonic rendition of “Happy Birthday” upon the gathering. Deliberately shunning Domino’s table (she shared it, as usual, with Bob, Pippi, and ZuZu), he took a seat (his feet planted carefully upon a chair rung) with those four diners—a relatively older group—presided over by Masked Beauty. To appease him, perhaps, there was an open bottle of wine on each table. The other bottles had disappeared. “One must make do,” he mumbled, dividing his table’s wine into four glasses (Maria Deux declined on the grounds of a troubled liver), and persuading, with forceful gestures, the other table to follow suit.

Gazing at Domino along a line of sight that bisected the wad of bubblegum that God, not wishing to defile his golden throne, had deposited on Masked Beauty’s compliant proboscis, Switters raised his glass. All present held their breath. To their relief, he said only, “To Simone ‘Domino’ Thiry! Long may she brighten this ball of clay with her grace!” Everyone uttered an assent of some sort, as she was cherished by her colleagues, and Domino reddened rather charmingly.

After the toast, things settled down to normal for a while, although Zappa’s contorted instrumentals kept a slight edge on the proceedings. However, as the wine receded—and it had completely vanished long before the eggplant-and-feta pie and the salad of chopped tomato and cucumber had been properly dispatched, the reverend sisters being thoughtful eaters—social intercourse attained a degree of animation typically seen only on blues nights and not always then. There was lively conversation and even a titter or two.

“Maria, O Maria, blessed lady of the tender repast, our genius engineer of endless culinary triumphs, please show us again the gastronomic mercy for which you are rightly renowned and allow the assembled celebrants to refill their cups, for though we be unworthy of the grape, any unsated thirst might be construed as an insult to the occasion. The birthday girl must be feted, and for that, naught but your prime-time vintage will do.” Switters was guessing that the extra wine had been stashed with Maria Une’s provisions. The hunch proved correct, for Masked Beauty, somewhat hesitantly, gave a nod of assent to the flustered old cook, whereupon Maria Une shuffled back to the kitchen and retrieved a pair of the missing bottles. When the vessels had been decorked and their contents distributed—both Marias this time abstained, leaving Switters little choice but to assume their allotment—a warm atmosphere enveloped the dining hall. Or, perhaps, Switters only imagined it.

Pippi lit candles at each table, as it was past the hour for her to turn off the power, and Switters withdrew the poem from his pocket, unfolded it, and read it to himself in the flickering glow while awaiting Pippi’s return from the generator shed. The poem was about some golden tablets, inscribed with secrets of the soul and heart and hidden in the pyramids, and how a wise Egyptian king had refused to allow Plato to mooch the tablets on the grounds that the Greek—weakened by his priggish philosophy of asexual love—mightn’t be able to bear up under the weight of so much robust passion. Clearly, the implication (he could imagine the poem being analyzed by his professor at Berkeley) was that the divine secrets are withheld from those who lack the courage to accept and explore their own sensual natures. An accurate enough sentiment, he heard his inner voice agreeing. But I can’t palm off this piece of anti-Platonic propaganda on Domino as a birthday present. What could I have been thinking?

In a move to outflank his imp, he thrust a corner of the page into the nearest candle flame. The paper instantly ignited, and he held on to the burning poem until the fire reached his fingertips, whereupon he dropped the last smoldering corner of it onto the wooden tabletop. (Good thing Pippi had never gotten around to sewing those pseudo-Italian tablecloths.) All conversation ceased at the onset of this little pyromaniacal display, and he sensed himself the object of apprehensive surveillance. In the middle of the burning, however, he overheard Domino say dismissively, “Mr. Switters is a CIA agent,” as if that explained everything; and he could tell that the sisters were conjuring images of him in a Moscow attic, on a secluded Cuban beach, or in a dim café in Casablanca, setting fire to coded instructions, plans for a deadly new weapon, or a single mysterious word scrawled in blood, in order that he might save a democratic government or a brave double agent, who happened to be, in her spare time, a beautiful contessa who’d donated her fortune to Catholic orphanages; and they, the Pachomian sisters, were reveling in these images. Reveling in them.

Inspired, Switters scooped up the poetry ashes and ate them. Then, lips all black and flaky, he raised his glass as if for another toast. His glass, alas, was empty. Registering his predicament, Masked Beauty handed him her wine, which was largely untouched. He smiled his appreciation. He took a gulp to wash down the lingering black snow of charred paper, and he said, “To nuns! On the occasion of Sister Domino’s birthday, I salute all nuns, for nuns are the most romantic people on earth.”

That seemed to go down pretty well with the assembly (although Domino was rolling her eyes a bit), so he elucidated. “Each nun gives her heart completely to a man from a distant place and a distant time, a legendary husband she loves beyond everything else, though he comes to her only in her prayers and her dreams. Every true romantic lives a life of idealized otherness, but it is the nun who lives it most purely and with the least self-serving compromise.”

At this, the sisters applauded. Even Domino clapped, although her clapping seemed watered down with politeness. Switters bowed and was about to continue, was about, in fact, to launch into a diatribe against Church fathers for relegating nuns to subservient positions, was about to go so far as to accuse their beloved old St. Pachomius of actually establishing nunneries as a devious means of getting devout women out of the way, neutralizing their sexuality, and exploiting their unpaid labor. Fortunately, perhaps, the three elder sisters at his table chose that moment to stand and excuse themselves, Maria Une to soak her varicose shanks, Maria Deux because she sensed her liver trying to turn itself into pâté (if only she could envision a ball of mystic white light in its stead!), and Masked Beauty to get her masked beauty sleep.

Leaping onto his chair, Switters waved off their departure. “Please, sisters, grant me a moment more. I’ll be leaving you soon, and before I go, I’d like to say. . . . Mmm, you know I could speak my piece with ever so much more, uh, ease and, uh, precision, were my tonsils frescoed with another light coat of the cardinal pigment: Maria, you flesh-bound instrument of numinous nurturance, I know you harbor two more bottles in your cupboard, and while I’d never be so rapacious as to covet them both . . .” At that point, ZuZu, who was weaving a bit and looking rather ruddy, filled his glass to the brim from a bottle she’d apparently retrieved from the kitchen when no one was looking. “Oh, thank you, my dear! God bless. Now. Mmm. Delicious. Now.” He cleared his throat.

“I’ve spent the greater part of my adult life in the company of men. Yes. And men that no honest, plainspoken, hard-working, God-fearing folk would want to be around for eleven seconds: wild-eyed, restless, and often dangerous men; fellows who could not drink this fine vin rouge of yours without losing control; rebels and dreamers and lunatics, soldiers-of-fortune, out-of-work mercenaries, vagabond scholars, expat journalists, gamesters, bohemians, and failed international speculators; irresponsible men who insist that something interesting must be happening pretty much at all times—or else, watch out! Men who’d enthusiastically stay up for days arguing over the nuances of a book even its own author couldn’t completely understand, yet refuse to devote half a minute to an insurance policy, a mortgage, or a marriage contract; men . . . well, I think you see the kind of fellows, bless their poor doomed butts, who I’m talking about here, and I mention them only to underscore the contrast between such men and the wholesome feminine companionship I’ve enjoyed these past nearly four months. Yes. Mmm.”

Following a big swig that nearly exhausted his libation, he, gazing at the ceiling, went on to laud the women for their devotion to simple tasks and for practicing stability without stagnation, although, as the tribute lengthened, he began referring to them in such overheated terms as “sunstruck outcasts,” “desert zealots” and “wilderness saints.” Eventually, as lines from Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen / And waste its sweetness on the desert air”) commenced to stray into the monologue, he realized that he’d lost his French and had been prattling away in English. Good God! Not this! he thought, as he suddenly imagined he heard himself crooning “Send in the Clowns.” But it wasn’t he. Someone had slipped his album of Broadway show tunes into the disk player.

As candle flames swayed to the haunting, bittersweet Sondheim refrain (part of the song’s appeal was that it was impossible to tell whether it was cynically ironic or sentimentally self-pitying), Switters glanced around the dining hall and discovered that his audience had abandoned him. Only three of the ex-nuns remained. Bob and ZuZu were dancing. Slow dancing. Dancing cheek to cheek, fairly clinging to each other, the circus frizz (somehow musically appropriate) of the one almost engulfing the practical Julia Child crop of the other. My, my, he thought. Am I responsible for this, or has it been going on for some time? The only other remaining diner was Domino, who sat at the next table, her arms folded across her chest, regarding him with an amused, sympathetic smile.

He seemed momentarily dazed but quickly recovered. “A man must get carried away with himself from time to time,” he said, “or run the risk of his juices drying up.” Domino nodded, still smiling, and the laser finished with Sondheim and moved on to the next cut, which happened to be the terminally romantic “Stranger in Paradise.” Indicating the blissfully gliding ZuZu and Bob, he inquired if she wouldn’t like to dance. She replied that while his talents were numberless, she really didn’t believe he could dance on stilts. “Push your table over here,” he said, and when she had coupled the two tables, he hopped up onto the combined surface, bidding her to follow. “I’ve frequented Asian nightclubs with smaller dance floors than this,” he said.

At first, they danced awkwardly, Domino keeping a discreet distance, but as she grew more accustomed to the novelty of the situation and as the music in her ears and the wine in her blood took over, she relaxed into his light embrace. “Can you believe?” she asked. “I haven’t danced since my junior prom in Philadelphia.”

“Well, then,” he said, dipping her gingerly, then pausing as “Stranger in Paradise” faded out and “If I Loved You” from Carousel came on, “consider this your present. Happy birthday.”

“Thank you. Thank you very, very much.” Her appreciation struck him as touchingly genuine. “When is your birthday?”

“It was back in July.”

“And you didn’t celebrate?”

“Lost track of the calendar and forgot all about it—until sometime in the middle of the night. Then I got up and went out in the desert and tried to count the stars. Astronomers claim the human eye can see no more than five thousand stars at any one time, but I swear I counted nineteen thousand. Not including asteroids and major planets. Of course, I may have counted some black holes by mistake. But it was a splendid celebration.”

Domino squeezed his hand and folded against him, moving in his arms like a pendulum moving in a grandfather clock. “I should like to have done that for my birthday: counting stars.” She sighed close to his ear. “Better than vespers, maybe.”

“Unless I’m mistaken, they’re still up there. Sirius, Arcturus, Alpha Centauri, the Big Dipper, Orion, neutron stars, pulsars, novas, supernovas, red giants, white dwarfs, purple people-eaters, the whole twinkly-assed crew. We could. . . .” He motioned toward the door.

“No,” she whispered. “Not tonight. I must go soon.” Her voice brightened without rising. “But tomorrow night? We could, if you want, count stars tomorrow night.”

“Sure. I’m free. I’ll meet you around ten. At the gate.”

“No. It’ll be cold and windy out there in the open. We’ll meet in the tower. You know? At the top of—what do you call it? The ladder.”

“As long as it isn’t the corporate ladder, I’ll be happy to climb it.”

They, in their dancing, had kicked over all but one of the candles. The dining hall was so faintly illuminated they could no longer ascertain if Bob and ZuZu were still in the room, yet Domino’s eyes seemed luminous, even though partially closed. If it was the wine that was responsible, either on her part or his own, he would ever be wine’s loyal friend. He swore it.

“My grandmother,” he said, “confessed to me once that before she’d ever let herself become deeply involved with a man, she’d make sure to get him drunk. Maestra claims you can never know who a person really is unless you’ve seen how they behave when under the spell of Bacchus. It’s a hard and fast rule with no exceptions: a bad drunk will make a bad husband. Or wife, for that matter. Sobriety, for some people, is a thin and temporary disguise.”

“Sounds not quite a proper method to me. Are you drunk, Switters?”

“Certainly not. But it’s a state that might be beneficially attained were I to gain access to that last bottle back in the kitchen. In the interest of knowledge, of course. We could see if I pass Maestra’s test.”

“You’ve rearranged enough furniture for one night.” She smiled, glancing at the combined tabletops over which they’d been (at times, precariously) skimming. The ballad from Carousel had ended and a lively, up-tempo tune from South Pacific was intruding on the mood. She pulled away from him. “See you at the tower. Bring your calculator.” She was going, and he was prepared to let her go, but, abruptly, before either of them could step aside, each of their faces moved forward, as if attracted by a sudden mutual activation of atomic dipoles or else shoved together by formless relatives of the Asmodeus. And they kissed. They surprised themselves utterly by kissing.

It wasn’t a lengthy kiss, as kisses go, yet neither was it a friendly peck. (As the Egyptians knew full well, Platonism never stood a chance in this world.) It was a kiss of moderate duration, devoid of all but the sweetest hint of tongue, yet a kiss fraught with pressure, irrigated with mouth moisture, and animated by some force that transcended the mere contracting and relaxing of oral musculature. It possessed a muscular rhythm, however, as well as a kinetic inquisitiveness, and a systemwide excitation was somehow synergistically precipitated by the crude, unsanitary, and yet glorious co-mingling of lip meats.

How could anything as commonplace—and in their pink, fatty, babyish way, dumb—as human lips produce such mysterious pleasure? Accompanied by tiny noises like carp feeding or rubber stretching or fallen kumquats returning to the branch? Fusing one pair of lips to another must be akin to attaching an ordinary prefix such as re or a or ex to an ordinary (and rather harsh) verb such as ward or rouse or cite. Looking at it from another angle, their kiss was like a paper airplane landing on the moon.

When at last they began to pull apart, a thread of spittle as slender and silky as a spider’s wire connected them for another second or two, as if they were continents linked by a single transoceanic cable. Then, with an inaudible pop, they were disconnected, staring at each other from opposite shores.

“À demain,” she said, a little breathless but not rattled in the least. “Tomorrow night.”

“The stars.”

“Count them.”

“Every damn one of them.”

“Okay.”

The following night, and every night thereafter for seven months, they lay on a Bedouin carpet in the roofless tower and looked up at the cat-black sky. Not many stars got counted. On the other hand, lest one jump to conclusions, not many carnal apples got bobbed, either—at least not in the sense of conventional sexual intercourse. What transpired nightly in the room at the top of the tower was at once more uneventful and more extraordinary than routine copulation and sidereal enumeration. And, no, that wasn’t a typographical error back there: it persisted for seven months.

The first night that they met in the tower and lay on the rug (Switters never dared to test that floor with his feet), admiring a moon that looked as if it had been oiled by a Kurdish rifleman and pointing at the satellites that skittered from sky-edge to sky-edge like waterbugs crossing a cow creek, Domino confessed, with a minimum of embarrassment and no shame at all, that she had “a big crash” on him. Switters, ever the language man, was on the verge of correcting her English when it occurred to him that being infatuated with the likes of himself was, indeed, probably more akin to a “crash” than a “crush.”

He reminded her, as she had once reminded him, that the very first time he laid eyes on her he’d blurted out that he loved her. He now had, he said, nothing to add to that declaration nor nothing to subtract. In all likelihood, he had been, as charged, out of his cotton-picking mind back then, and whether or not that condition had improved he was in no position to say. However—however—whatever he felt for her (and he could only describe the emotion as being as satisfyingly poignant as it was pesteringly agreeable), or she felt for him, it had been established—had it not?—that he was not her type, since he was a dollar short when it came to maturity and a day late when it came to peace.

“I may have been wrong about that,” she conceded. “You are a complicated man, but happily complicated. You have found a way to be at home with the world’s confusion, a way to embrace the chaos rather than struggle to reduce it or become its victim. It’s all part of the game to you, and you are delighted to play. In that regard, you may have reached a more elevated plateau of harmony than . . . ummph.”

Although shutting her up was probably not his sole or even primary motive, he kissed her before she could define him further. He kissed her hard—and soft and long and deep and dreamily and urgently, and she kissed him back. In a sense, Domino’s kisses were rather like Suzy’s, which is to say, they were both eager and shy, adventurous and uncertain, yet there was a strength in them (or immediately behind them), a solidity that made him feel that this simple, oddish act of osculation, was somehow supported by and connected to each and every one of what Bobby Case’s ol’ Chinese boys called “The Ten Thousand Things.” Indeed, there was a sense in which a kiss was a thing as well as an act, and Domino’s kiss, inexperienced in terms of execution but seasoned in terms of foundation, might be compared to new spring growth on a venerable tree, or (despite Switters’s disrespect for pethood) a puppy with a pedigree. Moreover, being a thing in and of itself, her kiss, while undeniably a concretized expression of an emotional state, was not necessarily a mere prelude to other activity, the leading edge of a larger biological urge. He liked that about it: the self-contained, concentrated isness or kissness of it, though he would have been the last to maintain that it failed to encourage larger biological urges.

As a matter of fact, he worked her chador off her shoulders, unhooked her bra, and bared her breasts. She didn’t object, though the breasts themselves, livid and alert, seemed almost to blink in astonishment at their exposure. He kissed them, licked and sucked them, rolled them in his palms, and squeezed their nipples between thumb and forefinger as if testing berries for ripeness or turning the knobs of a particularly delicate scientific instrument—and, actually, when he gently twisted the rosebud dials, it pumped up the volume of her breathing to a virtually orgasmic level. When he advanced his explorations and adorations to the lower half of her body, however, he was rebuffed. And, in truth, he didn’t mind. He had his hands full—and his mouth full, too—and he was content with that largess.

After a while, they paused to see if the stars were still there. Domino fingered her own nipples, perhaps to calculate the difference between his touch and hers; or, just as likely, to facilitate a conversational segue. “Have you noticed,” she inquired, “that the grapes are becoming full on the vine?” She wondered if he might be persuaded to stick around for the harvest and for the winemaking that would follow. She thought it only fair, she said, that he help replenish their pantry since he had done so much to reduce it. Of course, she knew how anxious he was to get down to Peru, no doubt with good reason. . . .

He interrupted to reveal that he’d always wanted to participate in a grape-stomping, longed to jump up and down on tubs of the fruit until his feet, including the spaces between his toes, were as purple as eggplants or 2-balls, and that he could never fully trust a person who didn’t find the prospect of squashing grapes in their bare feet irresistible; but, alas, he feared that stomping grapes on stilts would be neither very enjoyable nor very effective.

“Silly,” she said. “We are not old shoeless peasants. We use a press.” Then, as if there was some doubt that he fully understood the meaning of the word press, as applied to separating articles from their juices, she unzipped his fly and reached into his pants. When she touched active flesh, she drew back, startled, as though, reaching for a rope, she’d grabbed a snake by mistake. Switters appreciated this, in that it mitigated her boldness and reestablished her innocence, but he also appreciated it when, more cautiously this time, she returned her fingers to the surrogate grape-bunch and gradually tightened her grip. They kissed. Domino squeezed. She squeezed rhythmically (instinctively?), relaxing and then increasing tension. And it wasn’t long before the winepress demonstration produced graphic results. Needless to say, nobody thought to bottle the Château de Switters Beaujolais Nouveau, but few would have disagreed that it was a vintage pressing.

They spent the night in each other’s arms, sleeping only intermittently due to the novelty, the shock, of their romantic union. And sometime before the sun reclaimed their patch of Syrian sky, he agreed to stay on at the oasis until the end of October. They both knew full well that neither her request that he stay nor his consent to do so had anything especially to do with the actual harvesting of grapes.

The supply truck came, bringing gasoline, flour, soap, cooking oil, sugar, toothpaste, and salt. It also brought magazines and mail. Included in the mail was a statement from the Damascus bank with which the Pachomians did business, and the bottom line was not encouraging. So few contributions had been deposited in their account (widows in Chicago and Madrid each sent them a hundred dollars, Sol Glissant appeared to have forgotten them altogether) that Domino instructed the driver to reduce their usual petrol order by half next trip and to deliver no toothpaste or cooking oil at all. They’d clean their teeth with salt and attempt to make their own oil from the walnuts that would be ripening soon. She also canceled magazines and papers: they could get their news from the Internet. She did order, on behalf of Switters and paid for with his deutsche marks, a five-pack of cigars, a ten-pack of razor blades, and a six-pack of beer. The driver, who had no idea that there was a man residing at the convent, gave her a funny look.

Later, when the truck had gone and he’d come out of hiding, Switters said, “First purchases I’ve made in more than five months, and in that time not one person has tried to hypnotize, charm, cajole, mislead, or frighten me into buying their goods or services. You can’t appreciate how clean that feels.” No, having lived so long in an ad-free zone, she couldn’t really appreciate it, and she wondered if maybe he was not a bit of a tightwad. On the other hand, he had offered to pay what she considered an exorbitant sum for a pinch of hashish if only she would approach the driver about it. She refused.

The mail delivery also contained an unsigned postcard, addressed to Abbess Croetine and postmarked Lisbon. Everybody guessed it was from Fannie, though they couldn’t remember ever having seen a sample of her handwriting. Its message read, in badly misspelled French, Your secret is safe with me. For now!

Something was sorely troubling Masked Beauty, and it very well could have been that mysterious postcard. Or, it could have been that their dedicated daily tours of Net sites simply were not bearing fruit or producing results to her liking. More than likely, she was upset both by the card and the unsatisfactory data. In any case, she began gradually curtailing her appearances beside the computer and seemed, during that October, to have initiated an acceleration of the aging process. Her complexion, which heretofore had been unnaturally smooth, showed signs of cracking. Her pale eyes faded further, and her posture, formerly as upright with natural dignity as a flagpole with pompous sentiment, commenced to slump, giving the impression that, like Skeeter Washington, she’d spent too many nights hunched over a piano. Switters suspected that computers themselves could cause premature aging; and, obviously, the abbess had long been subjected to the tugs of earthly gravity, but something else was weighing on her, wrinkling her and pulling her down. Only her wart seemed unchanged and unaffected, a clod of red mud from the mean fields of Mars.

As second-in-command at the convent, Domino must have shared Masked Beauty’s every concern, yet she struck Switters as more radiant, more vivacious than ever. It would be easy to credit love, and maybe that’s where credit was due, but neither she nor Switters was the type to let themselves be made over by Cupid. Undoubtedly, they were delighted, even thrilled by their amorous bonding, each thoroughly intrigued with the other, yet they were suspicious of the affair as well, and tended to regard it with a skeptical, sometimes mocking eye.

While they displayed no affection in public, their affair was quickly common knowledge, and some of the sisters, most particularly the two Marias, were more than a little disapproving. As for Bobby Case, he was informed only that Switters had postponed for a month his return to the Amazon. Nevertheless, Bobby ventured a fairly accurate guess as to the reason for the delay, and he chided Switters for thinking with his little head instead of his big one. Bobby also chose that moment to transmit a photograph of his current girlfriend, an Okinawan cutie who looked not a day over fifteen. The fact that Domino was old enough to be the girl’s mother (almost, under the right circumstances, her grandmother), seemed not to faze Switters, if it registered on him at all.

Every night between nine and ten, he leaned his stilts against the tower’s adobe wall and climbed the long ladder to what he had christened the Rapunzel Suite. There, he rolled onto the carpet, propped his feet on a cylindrical pillow, and, watching the stars slide by like lighted portholes in a luxury liner, awaited Domino’s arrival. She would appear promptly at ten, never out of breath from the climb, pull her chador over her head, and snuggle in naked beside him. Unlike some women he’d known, she could shed her clothing without shedding her mystery.

It had been his experience that women of a certain age often tended to let themselves go. They became lax and dowdy. Switters supposed he couldn’t blame them: nobody had a greater disdain for maintenance than he. Undoubtedly, some of their frumpiness could be attributed to sheer laziness, to frustration, and to capitulation: they had given up on themselves, given up on life. All too often, however, they had simply been worn down, exhausted by having to serve too many children in addition to the helpless golfing goobers to whom they were bound by law. Was it because she’d been neither a harried wife and mother nor a steely career-chasing spinster that Domino’s spark continued to glow? Was it because she’d never compromised herself in the desperate, always illusional quest for security? He didn’t know. He didn’t very much care. “Never look a gift shoppe in the mouth” was his motto. Whatever she’d been like as a young woman, he suspected she had grown increasingly mysterious and alluring with age. She referred to herself as a “born-again virgin,” and one night near the end of his October extension, he learned that she meant it literally.

She asked him if he celebrated Christmas, and he answered that there were very few days on the calendar that he wouldn’t celebrate, if given half a reason. She protested that Christmas was special, it being the presumed birthday of Jesus Christ—or was that one more thing in which he didn’t believe?

“Um, well, it’s like this, Domino: I’ve always assumed that every time a child is born, the Divine reenters the world. Okay? That’s the meaning of the Christmas story. And every time that child’s purity is corrupted by society, that’s the meaning of the Crucifixion story. Your man Jesus stands for that child, that pure spirit, and as its surrogate, he’s being born and put to death again and again, over and over, every time we inhale and exhale, not just at the vernal equinox and on the twenty-fifth of December.”

She pondered that for a good long while, then eventually changed the subject. Soon after that, they were kissing, as was their custom, and when she turned aside his efforts to open her legs, a rejection that also had become routine, she—again, as usual—seized hold of the bulge in his panda-bear shorts. By this time, their behavior seemed almost scripted.

Obviously, he wanted something more, but he neither pressured her nor complained. The French say that the best part of an affair is going up the stairs. Desire is almost always more thrilling than fulfillment. In all likelihood, he was caught up in the drawn-out yearning, in the kind of innocent nasty intimacy, the Suzyness, if you will, of their gropings, so when she inquired if he was content with her manual manipulations, he replied only that she was amazingly adept at them. “I feel like a baton in a homecoming parade,” he said.

“I probably should not admit this to you,” she said, lowering her long lashes, “but in high school in Philadelphia, I was—”

“A drum majorette?”

“A what? Oh? No, not that. I was a one-woman petting zoo. Every boy in school was crazy to stick their fingers in the sexy French pie, and I cheerfully accommodated a great many of them. It did not take me long to learn how to please them without—how do they call it?—going all the way. Only Mr. Frederick, my basketball teacher, ever fucked me. Just once. I felt so guilty about it, this married man twice my age, that I—”

He kissed her eyelids. “You don’t need to spill these kind of beans.” Something about it was making him uncomfortable, even as it titillated him.

“But you’ve been so patient. I really must explain. When we moved back to France, I threw myself with whole heart into the arms of the Church. It was not just from girlish guilt, I want you to know. All my life I had loved Christ. And Mary. Especially Mary. I won’t bore you with details, but one thing led to another, and about the time that I decided to take up the cloth, I learned how my aunt came to have that wart on her nose. That gave me my own idea. I began to pray for the reinstatement of my virginity. Crazy, no? Such a silly girl. But I prayed and prayed. For years. And after a long while—it grew back.”

“Grew back? You mean your maidenhead?”

“My hymen. Yes. God gave it back to me. It is not an illusion. I have medical proof. More than one doctor has examined me and pronounced me complete. Okay, big cotton-picking deal! It’s nothing but a fold of mucous membrane . . .”

“A thin sliver of sashimi.”

“But as slight and expendable as it may be, it is my tangible link to Mary. And because of Mary’s unique oneness with humanity, which is her greatest attribute and appeal, it is a physical link, also, to the loving humanism that she represents. And that—that tiny tab of tissue . . .”

“That petal from a salty rose.”

“. . . is further proof of the power of prayer. To lose it for a second time, to squander a miracle, would be a major, dramatic thing for me. To permit that—that little . . .”

“Nub of translucent bacon.”

“. . . that petite . . .”

“Paper tiger that guards the pearl pot.”

“. . . to be pierced by even the finger of a man less important to me than my sacred vocation . . . well, it would be unacceptable.”

In the unlikely event that Switters needed a reminder that the world was a woo-woo place, Domino’s story of cherry resurrection would have filled the requirement. After taking a moment or two to absorb it, and thinking it wise not to ask what kind of man might possibly be as important to her as her sacred vocation, he clasped the hand that continued to clasp his now somewhat droopy member and asked, “This, however, is acceptable?”

“I don’t believe Almighty God is coincé. A prude. Didn’t he design these bodies for us to enjoy? Mary is said to have remained always celibate, a virgin in partu; yet she and Joseph lived together in wedlock. She would have had to do something to relieve his sexual tension.”

The image of Blessed Mother Mary as a hand-job artist, to use the coarse vernacular, was a bit startling, yet he was willing to expand the notion. Again, he squeezed her grip. “There are other options, you know; other, uh, practices in which they could have indulged.” He was pleased to observe that he could still lobster her up.

Domino admitted that there were said to be other, uh, practices. Especially in the Middle East. Then, after a short pause, she returned to the subject of Christmas.

“Just like Masked Beauty, I love and respect the desert. It’s the place where I feel closest to my breath and to the breath of God. The only time I’m discontent out here in the wilderness is at Christmas. I miss then so much the lights and the families and the cheer and the snow.” She talked about annual trips into the Alleghenies to cut a tree for their Pennsylvania house, about window displays in Philadelphia and Paris, the crowds, chocolate shops, candlelight masses at Notre Dame, and ice skating at Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville. There was something, Switters noticed, very childlike about her as she reflected upon the joys of past Noëls.

For some reason, she expected the coming holiday, the Christmas that was eight weeks away, to be particularly lonely and glum. Masked Beauty would arrange a lovely service, she always did, but this year even she seemed drained of energy and joy. Maybe it was the excommunication, maybe their financial situation, or maybe age had simply caught up with the blue nude, for she seemed in a blue funk. The Marias were getting old, too; Fannie was gone, and up to who knows what, and ZuZu and Bob were in a world of their own. Ah, but if Switters were at the oasis! If he were there, Domino knew he would find a way to make their bare desert Christmas as festive as the Champs-Élysées. For all of them, but especially for her. Certainly, he had his own agenda, he needed quite literally to get back on his feet, she appreciated that, but hadn’t Masked Beauty’s experience, as well as Domino’s own holy “wart,” shown him what prayer could accomplish? And anyway, it was only eight more weeks. Of course, he might be intent on spending the season with his grandmother, and . . .

She was getting slightly worked up, and Switters was enjoying listening to her tizzy. Misinterpreting his silence, she thought the moment had come to play her ace. “If you will spend the Noël with me,” she whispered conspiratorially, as if the stars had ears, “I will do something special for you.”

Misinterpreting her offer, he said, “Are you trying to bribe me?”

She smiled. “I will open up for you something only thirteen people on the earth—”

“Thirteen? That’s quite a lot. Listen, honey cake, if you wanted to open the pearly gates for me out of affection, or even out of wanton lust, I’d gratefully accept. But as payment for helping you fend off holiday depression . . .”

“You imbecile!” She rolled away from him. “Imbécile. You think for to have a Bing Crosby Christmas I would sacrifice my—I forget all your poetic names for it. No, jerko, I was talking about something altogether else.”

“Calm down. You’re losing your English.”

She did calm down. She even laughed. Sailor Boy would have approved. “It’s true, I suppose, that if you delay your departure, I might eventually find myself willing to experiment with one or more of those ‘other practices’ about which you were referring, but my bribe happens to be just this: on Christmas Eve, I will open up for your eyes the secret document that it has been the Pachomians’ fate to conceal and protect.”

“All right, I get it. You’re offering to trot out the Snake. Forgive me. My rooster brain jumped the conclusion fence. But, Domino, think about it: I used to be in the CIA. I ate secret documents for breakfast. I’ve handled more secret documents than Maria Une has handled chickpeas. What gives you the idea that I might drool on the Persian at the prospect of seeing another one?”

She sighed. “I, also, must be guilty of the wishful thinking.” She sighed again. “It’s just that you appeared to have at least a small bit of interest in the matter.”

“What matter is that?”

“The matter of the lost prophecy of Our Lady of Fatima. It isn’t lost, you see. We have it.”

As October picked up speed, dragging its grape skins behind it, daytime temperatures had become marginally less sizzling, the nights increasingly chilly. Switters, who hated the sight of gooseflesh (had found it pathological even prior to being subjected to the old crone’s naked parrot in Lima), pulled a wool rug up to his chin as he propped himself against the tower-room wall and lit the last of the five cigars that had come in the most recent Damascus delivery. “Mmm,” he hummed. “Mmm. Yes. A cigar is a banana for the monkey of the soul.”

Domino was the only lover he’d ever had who didn’t giggle almost automatically at his pronouncements. He wasn’t sure if that was a character flaw on her part or further evidence of her good sense and substance. More naked than any parrot could ever hope to be, even if plucked and singed, even if boiled and eaten, she stood in a far corner, washing her hands in a ceramic jar kept there for the purpose. He blew a series of smoke rings in her direction, jabbing an index finger through the center of each one as it floated away. “The Zen art of goosing butterflies,” he said.

It was too dark in the room to ascertain if she smiled, but she definitely didn’t giggle. “Think about my proposition,” she said.

He had thought about it. He was still thinking about it. He could smoke a cigar, make oblique remarks, admire her silhouette, and think about her proposition all at the same time. It was easy. Who did she think he was? Gerald Ford? John Foster Dulles? Pbthbt!

In truth, Switters was not overwhelmingly interested in the third and final prophecy of the Fatima apparition. He was curious about most of life’s tics, quirks, mysteries, unreasonable passions, aberrations, fetishes, enduring enigmas, and odd-duck jive, and his encounter with the Fatima legend a year earlier in Sacramento certainly had piqued that curiosity, but it would have been difficult if not impossible to separate clearly his interest in things Fatiman from his interest in things Suzian. Had his little stepsister not been so keen on the subject, he doubtlessly would have rolled the Fatima story about in his brain tumbler a few times and then let it pass. On the other hand, in a universe he knew to be founded on paradox and characterized by the interpenetration of sundry realities, he didn’t believe in coincidence. Although it was an era of resurgent Marianism, a recent survey had found that 90 percent of Roman Catholics remained unfamiliar with this Fatima business, and the fact that it had resurfaced so dramatically in his own life—in a setting occupied by Matisse’s live blue nude and provided, at least in the beginning, by Audubon Poe’s provider, Sol Glissant, well, these compounding synchronisms left him scant choice but to take it seriously.