Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

With an air of aloof benevolence, such as one might find in a kindergarten teacher whose interest in children was strictly professional, the cardinal led the group down a long, dim hallway to a door that opened onto a garden of unexpectedly large dimensions. Spring flowers and spring-green shrubs were everywhere, and there were pines and chestnut trees and scattered broken hunks of ancient columns that, relieved of their burden of porticoes, lay about in decorative retirement. Birds were singing, though with no more or no less religiosity than if they’d been at a New Jersey landfill, while the afternoon sun fuzzed everything in a lazy chartreuse haze. Gas of asparagus.

At the far end of the garden, perhaps fifty yards’ distant, there was an ivy-covered pavilion, a raised gazebo of sorts, made of ivory-painted latticed wood, and it was down a graveled path to that gazebo that the cardinal led them, single file, after first briefing them on the protocols of a papal reception.

Approximately five yards from the gazebo, the cardinal stopped them. When Switters, who’d been propelling himself, didn’t brake quickly enough, his wheelchair was jerked to a halt from behind. He glanced over his shoulder to see the captain hovering there. “I thought the Swiss Guard were all young bucks,” Switters said. “You look old enough to remember John Foster Dulles.” His subsequent expectoration was subdued, even delicate, but the Guardsman shook his chair forcefully and laid a firm hand on his shoulder.

“The Holy Kielbasa witnessed not one speck of my secular sputum,” Switters protested. He was correct. There was a throne inside the shadowy gazebo, but as best he could tell, peering through the ivy vines, it was presently unoccupied.

“You’ve been drinking alcohol, sir,” the captain said.

“Merely boosting the ol’ immune system,” explained Switters.

The party had spread out a bit in front of the gazebo, and the ex-nuns were staring hard, straining to glimpse the patriarch whom they might resist but whom they could not help but revere: their conditioning would allow no other response. Not one papal blip had appeared on their radar screens, however. Switters could make out two figures in business suits to either side of the empty throne, but neither of them cast a popish shadow. Scanlani entered the gazebo then and joined them. The trio conversed briefly, then called to the cardinal. In turn, the cardinal beckoned to Domino. “You have the paper of interest? Good. Please come.” He took her by the elbow and steered her up the four short steps that led into the gazebo. Mustang Sally and Pippi fell in behind her, bursting to genuflect, but a Guardsman blocked each of their paths, and even though Switters hadn’t moved, he felt the captain tighten his grip on the wheelchair.

A pair of songbirds flew over, making songbird noises.

Domino paused at the top of the steps. Although her back was to Switters, he could tell she was riveted on the pavilion’s rear entrance, searching for some sign of a little white monkey with china blue eyes and an aura of milky authority. She searched in vain, proceeding no farther, clutching the dog-eared Fatima envelope to her bosom. Gently the cardinal tried to nudge her inside, but she wouldn’t budge. At that point, however, Scanlani and his two companions began, in a friendly, if deliberate, fashion to edge toward her.

As they inched out of the deeper shadows, into the confusing pattern of ivy leaf and sunlight, one of the men proved to be good Dr. Goncalves, Fatima scholar and author of a biography of Salazar, in which he portrayed the Portuguese dictator as a latter-day apostle. There was something familiar about the second man as well. In a few clicks of his biocomputer, Switters identified him as a company spook, a shrewd, rat-eyed cowboy by the name of Seward, who was run by Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald and who apparently possessed some interest and expertise in religious affairs, having at one point petitioned Mayflower to allow him to smack the Dalai Lama, whose inner circle Seward had managed to penetrate. “The little sheet-wrapped bastard’s promoting a destabilizing brand of happiness,” Seward was said to have complained. Mayflower countered, “His emphasis on happiness is precisely why nobody takes him seriously.”

Switters was taking Seward seriously. It would be a major understatement to say he did not like the looks of this, the sound of it, the smell of it.

Those in the gazebo were conversing now. Even in the sweet green hush of the garden, he could hear nothing of the men’s side of things, but every now and then, he caught a word or two of Domino’s. He heard her say “no” a lot. He heard her say, “This isn’t right.” He heard her say, “I can’t do that.” He heard her say, “I will have to consult the abbess.” From the way her back muscles rippled under her best chador, he knew she was squeezing the prophecy to her breast, like the child she’d never borne. He glanced at Pippi. Her freckles were winking out like dying stars. He glanced at Mustang Sally. Plastered by sweat to her forehead, her spit curl formed an ominous question mark. “No,” he heard Domino say. Her voice was as firm as cheddar. Then, “How will I know that it’s . . .”

With one of those effortless, swift moves of his, Scanlani glided toward her. Something was clamped in his fist. Something about the length of a small flashlight. Something as shiny black as a licorice popsicle. Something obviously made from nonmetallic materials, perhaps in order that it might pass unnoticed through airport metal detectors. Like Switters’s Beretta. The Beretta that was locked now in a Vatican vault, as though it were one of the Holy See’s legendary treasures.

His arm extended, Scanlani leveled the sinister object at Domino’s head, intending—there was no doubt—to shoot her point-blank, right between the eyes.

Switters screamed. “Stop, motherfucker! You!”

The captain attempted to restrain him, but the way Switters snapped the man’s wrist in half, it might as well have been the wrist of a Barbie doll.

It is tempting to report that that whole past year with Sister Domino was unfolding now before him in a speed-parade of images—odd and endearing and frustrating; a hurricane of blurry memories that blew past his inner eye as if it were tied halfway up a middle-aged palm tree. In actual fact, there was nothing at all in his brain but a clear, clean hum: the cultivated signal that, in men of his background, transformed the primal siren of wah-wah panic into an articulated call to action.

Switters leapt from the chair.

His left foot hit the ground first. The instant it touched, it was as if an angry viper had sunk its fangs into the instep. A severe jolt shot through his body. There was a deafening pop, and a ball of white light—decidedly not a mystic coconut—exploded behind his eyes.

He staggered sideways.

He pitched forward onto his face.

Switters had once read somewhere that according to data accumulated from the black-box flight recorders of crashed aircraft, the last words spoken by pilots, upon realization that they were doomed, was most often, “Oh, shit!”

What did it say about human frailty, about the transparent peel of civilization, about the state of evolution, about the dominion of body over mind, when, at the moment of their imminent death, modern, educated, affluent men were moved to an evocation of excrement? That as the ax abruptly fell on their mortal lives, technologically sophisticated commanders of multimillion-dollar flying machines usually uttered no proclamation of sacred, familial, or romantic love; no patriotic sentiment, no cry for forgiveness, no expression of gratitude or regret, but rather, a scatological oath?

Quite likely, it said very little. Almost certainly, the word shit was issued without the slightest conscious regard for its literal meaning. On an unconscious level, the oath might be significant, but one would have to be a fairly fanatical Freudian to propose that it indicated the persistent domination of an infantile fixation on feces.

In any event, though he might imagine Bobby Case uttering something of the sort (Bobby was a Texan, after all), Switters, mildly appalled by the information, vowed that no such phrase would mark his final exit. “Oh, shit” lacked grace, lacked class, lacked charm, lacked imagination, lacked any indication of full consciousness. It was simply vulgar, simply crude, and while Switters appreciated profanity’s occasional value as verbal punctuation, as a highly effective vehicle for emphasis, he was scornful when louts swore as a substitute for vocabulary, youths as a substitute for rebellion, stand-up comics as a substitute for wit.

When his end came, Switters had always trusted that he would improvise something original if not profound; something appropriate to the specific situation, which was to say, something dramatically correct. If nothing else, should time be short and inspiration shorter, he would, he had vowed, bellow wahoo!—one final, culminating, roller-coaster-rider whoop of defiant exhilaration.

A noble ambition, perhaps. Yet when the earth viper bit, when the internal fireball exploded, when he lost contact with the world and went spiraling off into an electrified darkness, he hadn’t cried wahoo or anything remotely resembling a famous last word. And had there been a black box in the cockpit of his Invacare starship, it would have recorded his last words before he was sent spiraling into that electrified darkness as, “Stop, motherfucker.” How very déclassé, how very embarrassing.

Electrified darkness because it wasn’t passive. And it wasn’t really dark. Or rather, it was dark and it wasn’t dark. It was a darkness that behaved like light. Or, maybe, it was light that behaved like darkness. How was he supposed to know? Spiraling into it, out of control, he was in no position to judge. The condition seemed, in a sense, neutral—yet, as stated, it was far from static. Had he time to analyze it (which he did not, being embedded in a trans-temporal state, where the linear pencil of analysis had an eraser at both ends), he might have described it as an interface. As an interface between darkness and light. As an imperceptibly thin crack between yin and yang. A reality between that which is and this which is. A number between one and zero. Spiraling.

Switters realized then that he had passed that way before. The Hallways of Always. Except now there were no botanical tryptamine alkaloids churning in his belly. And so far, no pod things boasting that they owned the business. There was, however, a faint glow in what might be called the distance, a sort of end-of-the-tunnel luminosity, and it was pulling him toward it. “No! I absolutely refuse to have some trendy near-death experience,” he heard himself exclaim. “Serve me the real enchilada or let me—”

“Heh!”

“Maestra? Is that you? Are you . . . okay?”

There was no reply. He spiraled on through the tunnel. Or, the tunnel spiraled on through him. Was he a toy boat in the gutter, or was he the gutter—and where were the Art Girls? He drew closer to the glow. Or, it drew closer to him. It was proving to be not a light as such, but something more on the order of a pulsating membrane, feathery and multicolored, with lots of greens and reds. The membrane had no alter image, no counterpart, and he began to wonder if in that dichotomous void, there wasn’t a singularity after all. Might this be the aura of the Ultimate? The medulla of the mandala? The Immaculate Heart made visible? A hyperspatial hymen? He became aware, then, of sound: not the music of the spheres, by any means, but a low, crusty, constricted noise, scrumbling harshly out of the membrane, almost as though it were clearing its throat.

Yes, that was it. Switters had the distinct feeling, moving into that polychrome pulsar, that it was preparing to speak to him; that, like the alleged prophets of old, he was about to hear the actual voice of that which men call God. He was, as the figure of speech would have it, all ears.

There was another spasm of hacking rasps. Then—it spoke.

“Peeple of zee wurl, relax!”

Was what it said.

The glow sputtered out.

Nothingness replaced it.

And that was that.

Send in the clowns.

At that instant, or so it seemed, Switters reentered the realm of ordinary consciousness. He knew it was the realm of ordinary consciousness because it hurt like hell. And because he sensed the presence of advertising.

Things did not come slowly into focus. He opened his eyes and, bingo, he took everything in sharply and at once: the pale yellow walls, the Chianti-colored curtains, the sleek chrome table at bedside (in Italy, even hospital rooms had style); the Marlboro cigarette billboard that dominated the view from the window; Pippi in a brand-new, contemporary, lightweight habit, Domino wearing her old Syrian chador, wearing her old marrow-melting smile, wearing her round cheeks and vivacious air.

“Where am I?” he asked. Immediately, he groaned and, unwisely, slapped his sore forehead. “Let me withdraw that question,” he pleaded. He withdrew it because, within limits, he could guess where he was and, more important, because the question was so pathetically predictable. What a cliché.

“You’ve come back to life,” said Domino. Her voice, even more than usual, was like a Red Cross doughnut wagon purring into earshot after a disaster.

“To where?”

“To life. La vie.”

“Right. To life. To the ol’ bang and whimper show. You, as well, Domino! You’re okay! Bless your heart! The bastard didn’t . . . What happened? Bonjour, Pippi. I should say, Sister Pippi.” He indicated her garb. “Man, that was fast. How long was I out?”

“This is the tenth day.”

He sprang halfway up in bed, nearly severing the IV tube. “Ten days?!!” He was flabbergasted.

Gently Domino eased him back down onto the pillow. “Day before yesterday, you started mumbling in your sleep. The day before that, you fluttered your eyelids and wiggled your toes. The doctors were pretty sure you were going to come out of it. We’ve offered many, many prayers.”

“But what. . . ?” He ran his hand over his bandaged head. “I wasn’t shot, was I? It was the taboo.”

Domino smiled sympathetically. “You fainted,” she said.

By Domino’s account, it happened like this:

When the empty throne caused her to pause at the gazebo entrance, she had been informed that the Holy Father’s lunch had been unkind to him, and due to heartburn (“surely the breath of Satan”), he would be unable to keep his appointment. The pontiff sent blessings and regrets, and requested that she entrust “the paper of interest” to his aides.

Suspecting subterfuge, Domino refused. She asked for a postponement. She’d come back later with her abbess, she said. A small argument ensued. Eventually Scanlani took out his flip phone and punched in a number. He said that she could enjoy the rare privilege of speaking to the pope on the telephone. He said the pope would personally verify that he wished the envelope turned over to an aide. “How will I know it’s really him?” she had asked. Scanlani fired a short burst of Italian into the mouthpiece. The lawyer listened, he nodded. “He’ll wave to you,” he said. “The Holy Father will wave to you from his bathroom window. You will be able to see him up there, on the phone, talking to you. What an honor.”

As Domino, confused, was considering this, Scanlani held out the cell phone. “Go ahead. Speak to the Holy Father,” he said, holding the phone to her head. It was then that Switters had gone berserk.

“You broke a man’s arm. You yelled something obscene. You bounded out of your chair. But as soon as your feet touched the earth, you fainted.”

“It was Today Is Tomorrow. His curse. Wham! Hit me like a poison hammer. All the way from the Amazon.”

“I’m sorry,” she said soothingly. “You fainted.”

To keep himself from shouting, “Did not! Did not!”, he gazed out the window at the Marlboro Man. There was a fucking cowboy for you. Corporate puppet, believing he was free; brain full of testosterone, heart full of loneliness, jeans full of hemorrhoids, lungs full of tar.

“When you fell,” she said, “you hit your head on the edge of one of those old broken columns. Ooh-la-la! It was terrible. It sounded like a coconut cracking.” She turned to the freckled nun. “Darling, we’ve been remiss. Would you please go alert the medical staff that Mr. Switters has awakened.”

After Pippi left the room, Domino said, “We’re here in Salvator Mundi because the Vatican hospital refused to admit you. In fact, the Swiss Guard has a warrant for your arrest. Now, be calm. That American, that Mr. Seward, promised he wouldn’t let them touch you. And if he doesn’t stop them, I shall.”

The conviction with which she said this made him grin. And when he grinned, his head hurt. “So, I tanked and split my skull.”

“Yes, you did.” After a beat, she added, “You also chipped another tooth. I must tell you, I will not stand at the altar with you until you’ve spent some quality time with your dentist.”

He was startled. “At the altar, Domino? The altar? Does this mean you’ve decided that I’m not too . . . after all?”

“By no means,” she said. “You definitely are too. . . .” She lowered her lashes. She stared at the floor. When she smiled, it was as though a hurdy-gurdy ice cream truck, laden with thirty-one flavors, had followed that doughnut wagon into the scorched neighborhood. “But I think I might want to marry you anyway.”

Switters looked out of the window. To the Marlboro Man, he said, winking, “Hear that? Rimbaud wasn’t kidding, pal. Of course, it takes more than calluses and a cough to qualify as a fierce invalid.”

A doctor arrived and shooed the women out. Brandishing a penlight, he spent an inordinately long time staring into what some have called Switters’s fierce, hypnotic green eyes. He warned his patient that Italian immigration authorities were itching to get their hands on him, but, for the time being, the hospital would not permit it. He inquired if he was hungry, and Switters, licking his chops, commenced to recite the entire menu of Da Fortunato al Pantheon. Later, an orderly brought a covered bowl. Unlidded, it proved to contain a clear broth—but this being Italy, several meaty tortellinis bobbed in it like fat boys at the beach.

Early the next morning, the testing began, culminating in a 360-degree CAT scan. Considering what he’d experienced during his coma, maybe it ought to have been a parrot scan. A poet scan. An interlocutor scan. A guide-to-the-underworld scan. (Pronounce the Aztec word and win a free week at the Gene Simmons Tongue Clinic.)

Throughout the day, as he was being poked, probed, punctured, pricked, and positioned; even as he lay sweating in the claustrophobic culvert of the CAT scanner, Switters had one primary question on his mind. It wasn’t, What’s going to happen to me next? It wasn’t, Will I marry my nun and live happily ever after? But, rather, How did I survive the curse?

Perhaps it was psychosomatic, a self-fulfilling prophecy, but he had felt a massive jolt when his foot touched the ground. It was like being struck by lightning. Yet, it hadn’t killed him. Today Is Tomorrow wasn’t the type to do things in a half-assed way, and there was evidence that he didn’t make idle threats: consider poor Potney Smithe. Was this the shaman’s first attempt at a joke? No, as Potney might have put it, not bloody likely. Nevertheless, Switters had broken the taboo and escaped retribution. Why? Why hadn’t he died?

That evening, he got an answer.

Domino was allowed to visit him after dinner (risòtto con funghi and tiramisù). She gave him a big kiss. Then she gave him a big envelope.

“What’s this? The prophecy?”

“No, no. The Vatican has the prophecy. I ended up giving it to them, even though I never got to see the pope at his bathroom window. What they will do with Fatima’s words, who can guess? I advised Scanlani that we have an interesting interpretation. He said he’d get back to me.” She smiled skeptically. “But they did reinstate us. Issued us new habits.”

Switters started to say, “There could be a slow-acting, skin-absorbed poison in the fabric”—but he caught himself. Hadn’t he subjected her to quite enough paranoia? Besides, she was still wearing a chador.

“The envelope is from your friend, Bobby Case. Oh, I forgot to tell you that Masked Beauty is in Rome. She came a week late. While she was attending to the visa problem in Damascus, she picked up our mail at Toufic’s office. This was in our box. Yes, and Captain Case has telephoned twice, as well. He’s very nice. Très sympathique.”

“Yeah,” Switters growled. “Case can nice the damn birds out of the damn trees.” Was that a twinge of jealousy he felt? He flipped over the envelope and recognized Bobby’s surprisingly fine handwriting. “You say he called?”

“Perhaps it was forward of me, but I took the liberty of phoning your grandmother the night of the . . . the accident. She must have informed Captain Case because he called two days later. He called again yesterday shortly before you came out of the coma. I had brought your cell phone over from the hotel.”

Switters examined the postage stamps. They were not Okinawan stamps. They were Peruvian stamps. They were stamps from South-too-goddamn-vivid-America.

He delayed opening the envelope until Domino had gone. An hour later, when the night nurse came in to take his temperature and update his chart, he was still staring at its contents.

It contained a single photograph, eight and a half by eleven. In the background of the picture, against a tangled wall of tropical forest, stood a group of twenty or so Indians, nearly naked, strangely painted. In the foreground was an object that he recognized almost immediately as Sailor Boy’s old cage, made of wicker, shaped like a pyramid. “Well, what do you know?” he mumbled, though it was hardly unusual that the Kandakandero had kept the thing. Then, he noticed that the birdcage wasn’t empty. There was something inside.

It was another pyramid.

A pyramid the size of a soccer ball.

A pyramid crowned with parrot feathers.

A pyramid with a human face.

The accompanying note, on Hotel Boquichicos stationery, was in Bobby’s incongruously elegant script.

I knew you wouldn’t believe it unless you saw it—so take a good look. Take two looks and call me in the morning.

Don’t worry, podner, I didn’t smack him. It wasn’t necessary. They say a big snake got him. Forty-foot anaconda or some unhappy shit like that.

It’s wild down here, ain’t it? Man! No wonder you believed that curse. My guide is the new head shaman and he is one radical dude. Says he knows you. I’m bringing him back to the States with me, which ought to be a lark and a half. I’ll fill you in soon. Meanwhile, have yourself a nice long walk. You’ve earned it.

In the photograph, the warriors were all grinning in razzle-dazzle unison, like the cast of a minstrel show.

Switters borrowed the nurse’s penlight and examined the head in the birdcage. It was also smiling. It looked . . . relaxed.

The floor had felt strange at first: alien, almost threatening. Gradually, however, it became increasingly hospitable. Beneath his bare feet, the waxed linoleum turned into an orgy. He went from walking like Neil Armstrong to walking like Krishna. Both cool and warm, smooth and wavy, the floor felt like fruit skin. It felt like lettuce. Something invisible and pleasurable oozed up between his toes. Up and down the hallway he padded, slapping the floor with his soles to experience the floorness of it. Every now and then, when he was out of sight of the nurses’ station, he did a little monkey dance. “I’m going to jump out the window and dance on grass,” he told Domino. She reminded him that he was five stories up.

For much of the day, Domino walked with him, listening to him rant about large snakes, the World Serpent, the healing python of Apollo, the wiggly staff of Hermes, and so on; how, in his opinion, the Serpent hadn’t seduced Eve into tasting the apple of forbidden knowledge, rather, the Serpent was the apple: watching the Serpent shed its skin and be reborn, Eve was introduced to the prospect of immortality; observing the Serpent on its forays underground, Eve was led to suspect that there was more to life than met the eye, that there were other, deeper, levels; a reality beneath the surface of reality, an unconscious mind. Hadn’t the metaphoric Serpent in Domino’s own little Eden, once it was viewed from a wider angle, blown open the gates—and angered the authorities? As for why serpent power killed Today Is Tomorrow, however, he had barely a clue. Supreme knowledge is supremely dangerous, ultimate mysteries remain ultimately mysterious. Beware the delusional rationalist who argues otherwise.

The walking was delicious, and the ranting was pretty good, too. He walked and ranted, ranted and walked, interrupted only by lunch and by Masked Beauty, who stopped in to squeeze his hand and say adieu. The abbess, Mustang Sally, and Pippi were returning to Syria that evening. She hoped to see him there again someday. She looked handsome in her new summer habit. The scar on her nose had darkened, he noticed. It was now the exact same shade of blue in which Matisse had immortalized her naked body in 1943.

Later, drained by the walking, and in bed early, Switters lay fantasizing future scenarios. Bobby Case was bringing Fer-de-lance to the Northern Hemisphere. To the white man’s world. Fer-de-lance, with all his ancient magic and contemporary awareness; a half-breed in every sense of the word; equipped—linguistically, epistemologically, and physically—to flourish in more than one reality. Suppose Fer-de-lance were to throw in with them? With Switters, Bobby, Audubon Poe, and Skeeter Washington (who’d recently lost a hand defusing a land mine in Eritrea, but was said to play a hot five-finger-and-nub piano); with B. G. Woo and Dickie Dare and some other operatives and ex-operatives whom he ought not to name? Maybe even Domino would come aboard: hadn’t she expressed a weakness for the idea of a purist elite? Suppose the lot of them were to combine forces? To organize. Sort of.

They probably wouldn’t name it, this new organization of theirs. Cult of the Great Snake would be presumptuous and far-fetched; and he was getting pretty tired of angels, as Hollywood, gullible Christers, and New Age loopy-doodles had combined to give them a trite, fairy-godfather image. Most definitely, the group would not have a creed. Unless it was something modest and non-doctrinaire, such as, “The house is on fire, but you can’t beat our view.”

They wouldn’t even believe, especially, in their mission; not in any fervent way. If they believed too adamantly, then sooner or later they would be tempted to lie to protect those beliefs. It was a small step from lying to defend one’s beliefs to killing to defend them.

Hey, they might not be fully cognizant of the nature of their mission. They’d contemplate it, to be sure, and argue over it, but it would be dynamic, a work in progress, ever subject to change. Only the weak and the dull of the world knew where they were going, and it was rarely worth the trip.

They’d use Poe’s yacht, maybe, and Sol Glissant’s funding. But they’d be more aggressive than Poe had been. Poe was treating the symptoms. They would attack the disease. They would fuck with the fuckers. Sabotage: physical, electronic, and psychic sabotage. Monkey wrenches. Computer viruses. Psychedelic alterations. Ridicule. Japes. Spells. Enchantments. Dadaisms. Reinformation. Meditational smart bombs. On the side, they might deface a few advertisements. Vandalize some golf courses.

Mostly, however, they’d follow Fer-de-lance’s lead. See what he had up his snakeskin sleeve. See if he really was destined to bring Today Is Tomorrow’s message into an unsuspecting new century. Determine if Our Blessed Lady of Fatima, in her role as feminine principle, employing her archaic code, had actually rematerialized to alert her children to a hard and wonderful truth about to stream in a helix of light and shadow from the direction of a pyramid.

Not quite asleep, not wholly awake, Switters was lying there fantasizing about all that when the cell phone suddenly beeped. “This had better be good,” he growled into the mouthpiece.

Maestra actually wept at the sound of his voice. She quickly recovered, however, and proceeded to tell him how inconsiderate he was, and what a buffoon; no, something worse than a buffoon, because he was brilliant and therefore had no right to behave buffoonishly. He was also a pervert. She ordered him to come to her the instant they let him out of that “squalid Italian hospital,” and never mind the bracelets: her arms were getting too damn scrawny to support them anymore.

Then, Suzy got on the line. Got on the phone with that double-tongued little voice of hers, her consonants straight-backed with the most demure sincerity, her vowels all lopsided with hormones. Suzy told him she loved him and wanted to be with him forever, in the way he used to talk about back when she was just a spank girl. She’d be eighteen in less than a year and could do as she pleased.

“You know, I had sex last summer, Switters, and now I’m so sorry. I’m devastated. Not because they got mad and sent me to Seattle, but because you weren’t the first. You know? Well, I’ve been praying to Mother Mary that she’ll restore my virginity. So that I can give it to you. Honestly. I really am praying for that. I know it’s goofy, but miracles can happen, can’t they?”

“They can, darling. They happen all the time.”

There has got to be a way to have both of them, he thought. Domino and Suzy, too. He spent the entire night devising one delectable and improbable scheme after another, refusing to accept that the fates might force him to choose one or the other. He loved them both. He wanted them both. It was only natural. He was Switters.

Early the next morning, he checked himself out of the hospital, and he and Mr. Plastic flew to Bangkok. To clear the coconut. To mull matters over.

There was a temple by the river, where he meditated every day. Nights, there were the girls of Patpong. Bless them. Bless every slink and wisp of them. There were refreshing, if timid, beers. Food so spicy it’d run a motor. A little stick now and then.

Cowboys were fond of saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Switters thought, It’s always broke, and we can never fix it. On the other hand, there’s nothing to break, so what is it we imagine we’re fixing?

The baht was weak against the dollar. A back-alley tailor made him a new linen suit. He walked in it. Danced in it. Acknowledged the Tao. The seam in the Tao. At moments he felt as if he were at least an inch and a half off the ground.

He kept bumping into old acquaintances, and one midnight they took him to a meeting of the C.R.A.F.T. Club—where, legend has it, he got up and squawked like a parrot.

about the author

TOM ROBBINS has been called “a vital natural resource” by The Portland Oregonian, “one of the wildest and most entertaining novelists in the world” by the Financial Times of London, and “the most dangerous writer in the world today” by Fernanda Pivano of Italy’s Corriere della Sera. A Southerner by birth, Robbins has lived in and around Seattle since 1962.

acknowledgments

The author wishes to lift a goblet of vintage ink to his agent, Phoebe Larmore; his editor, Christine Brooks; and his five-book line editor, Danelle McCafferty (who taught him south from north—or was it the other way around?). He also salutes his assistant, Barbara Barker; his former assistant, Jacqueline Trevillion (twelve years before the mast); his longtime typist, Wendy Chevalier; and the numerous other women (lucky dog!) who dominate his life, including, but definitely not limited to, his attorney, Margaret Christopher; his yoga teacher, Dunja Lingwood; his Patpong social directors, Little Opium Annie and Miss Pretty Woman; his anatomical researcher and mayonnaise scout, Koryn Rolstad; his French connection, Enid Smith-Becker; and, most emphatically, his eternal love dumpling, Alexa.