Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

by Tom Robbins

  Still, the Hermetic tradition had deeper roots than any of our religions (though not as deep as shamanism), and was rumored to be preserved to this day by adepts who honored it without banging any pots and pans. On the other hand, those adepts (sometimes called the Invisible College) were few in number, weak in influence. Even in its heyday, Hermeticism had never—so far as anybody knew—turned a single tide of history. Was there any sound reason to reckon that there would occur a resurgence of Hermetic interest in the near next century (the millennial page was so close to flipping one could feel its latent breeze), and that it would thus inspire or instruct a significant minority of the corporate-molded populace to tune its cells to a higher frequency? No, there was something about such a scenario that just didn’t pitch. Granted, he wasn’t much of a consumer, but if this was what Fatima was selling, he was keeping Mr. Plastic in his wallet, at least until he kicked a few more tires and drove around the block.

  Using one of the stilts, he swatted a winter lemon loose from a bough, catching it as it fell, a feat that filled him with immense pleasure. He reamed the fruit with a stiff finger, and for some perverse reason, thought of Domino and the intimacies of the previous night. Then, squeezing lemon juice onto a patty of cold falafel, smelling its citric aliveness, rolling its fresh solar acids—yellow, dynamic, and changeless—along the bronco spine of his tongue, he turned back to the curious prophecy.

  What possible impetus could there be for a Hermetic renaissance? An unearthing, perhaps, of the fourteen golden tablets? He tried to imagine a team of Egyptologists brushing the sands of centuries from the plates, scanning their magnifying glasses along the columns of glyphs, suggesting, months or years later, during an announcement on CNN, that if beleaguered viewers were only to heed the oblique instructions so quaintly encoded in those ancient alchemical symbols, they might develop techniques and practices for overcoming their human limitations, and, in the process, a way to understand—and function smoothly within—an immutable cosmic order. But try as he might, he couldn’t envision the impact of such information lasting much beyond the cheeseburger and minivan commercials that would follow it. Hermeticism had its merits, certainly, but it lacked immediacy. It seemed so stereotypically occult as to be fusty and inane, like the wizard hat that Mickey Mouse wore when he played the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. In his gut (where the ball of white light was spritzing the acerbic droplets of lemon juice), he sensed that a neo-Hermetic utopia was even less likely than an Islamic one.

  Pausing then, brushing the last falafel crumbs from his lips, he thought of the old trickster who’d given his name to those Greco-Egyptian mysteries: old Hermes, god of transitions, runner of errands between the two worlds, patron of explorers and thieves. Setting up his three-card monte stand on the frontiers of knowledge, Hermes was neither a suffering savior deity nor a loving father deity, but a brash bringer of new ideas and practical solutions to those who were quick enough to grasp them, strong enough to accept them. Hermes could be regarded as the immortal prototype of the mortal shaman, and like shamans everywhere, he was a revered practitioner of folk medicine, conversant on every level with plants, constellations, and minerals. He could heal, but he also could—and would—play outlandish pranks. Rather similar, as Switters had earlier noted, to Today Is Tomorrow, damn his parrot-boiling hide.

  In the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean regions, Hermes had been identified originally as one of the Great Mother’s primal serpent-consorts, an aspect still alluded to by the pair of snakes entwined around a rod in the Hermetic logo of the American Medical Association. Levantine lore went so far as to view Hermes as a personification of the World Snake, the ruler of time, and in dragging that arcane tidbit from his memory pond, Switters’s mind again scrolled to the Amazonian shaman. When Switters had asked R. Potney Smithe if the Kandakandero religion (if it could even be loosely described as a religion), had a name, the anthropologist had replied that when the tribal elders referred to anything remotely resembling a belief system, it was with a phrase that translated as something like, the Cult of the Great Snake. (“That’s bloody damned epic, isn’t it? Eh? Mind you, I haven’t the foggiest notion what it infers.”) Switters hadn’t a clear notion, either, but there in the Syrian bake, he experienced a tiny chill as he remembered that other character, the crafty, multilingual, ex-Marxist mestizo who, though not a Kadak (not one of the “Real People”), appeared to be working toward becoming Today Is Tomorrow’s disciple, if not his lieutenant or rival; and how the dude had renamed himself Fer-de-lance and sported a constrictor-skin ensemble (except for gold teeth and Nike basketball shoes). Fer-de-lance radiated some spooky, transcultural, reptilian charisma, which was not unenhanced by the buzz that he supposedly had an ongoing relationship—a totemic dialogue, a Moby Dickian fixation, a vendetta, or a marketing ploy: who could even guess?—with a forty-foot-long anaconda. Hale fellow, well met.

  As near as Switters could recollect, Today Is Tomorrow, himself, expressed no direct interest in any kind of serpent magic, not in regard to time or anything else. However, this circuitous reminiscing about the witchman had brought his image fully to mind, and, abruptly, at that instant—wham! bam!—a thought hit Switters like a stockyard paddle smacking a porker’s backside. Could it possibly? . . . Yes! Of course! How obvious! That was it! He felt the validity of it in every gob of his marrow. And in a sudden rush of eureka, he forgot himself, taboowise, and very nearly sprang to his feet.

  He had caught himself, steadied himself, realigned his heels on the loaf of red rock where they’d been carefully propped, and leaned back against the spindly trunk. Overhead, the lemons swung like papier-mâché stars in a cheesy planetarium. It was a totally bizarre theory, he supposed, this connection he was entertaining, but the Fatima phenomenon was pretty crazy, too, and the mere fact that it had been accredited by a major mainstream institution didn’t render it any less so. Switters was, well, if not thoroughly emotionally excited, at least intellectually stimulated, and he was anxious to share his “discovery” with Domino. Much as she had shared the secret prophecy with him? Had drawn him into the pudding? Irrationally, perhaps, he thought of Eve introducing the consciousness-expanding snake fruit to her partner in Eden. The sharing of certain kinds of knowledge is seldom without consequences.

  For better or for worse, however, his desire to apprise Domino was thwarted. She remained in seclusion the whole of Christmas Day, thickly cocooned in prayer, though whether to please Baby Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or Masked Beauty was never evident. Frustrated, Switters had brainstormed awhile longer under the furniture-scented tree, then stilted off to the office to e-mail a holiday greeting to Bobby Case. To his surprise, his friend had returned the sentiment immediately. Massive merriment to you, son. Here on Oki, we got us raw octopus with all the trimmings. How you spending your day?

  There being no way to truthfully explain, Switters replied that he had to leave right away to attend a performance of The Nutcracker.

  Hope it’s the one with Tonya Harding, wired Bobby. And that was that.

  In his room, having retrieved the remainder of the arrack from the tower, Switters drank, pondered, drank some more, pondered some more. Within an hour, both the drinking and the thinking petered out, and he turned to Finnegans Wake, though he got no further than a line in the preface, where Stan Gebler Davies wrote of Joyce, “The man had an interesting life, which most men do who have an abiding interest in women, drink, high art, and the operation of their own genius.” Stopping to consider that statement—wondering why it seemed so tricky, so difficult, to lead simultaneously an interesting life and a conventionally moral life (it was as if some pathology of dualism conspired to make them mutually exclusive)—he fell asleep and did not wake until morning, when there was an urgent rapping at his door.

  “Monsieur Switters! Le camion! Le camion!”

  “Pippi?” It had to be Pippi, for even the voice sounded freckled and red-haired. “What? The truck? Le camion? Pourquoi?”

  It was true
. The supply truck had arrived. It hadn’t been expected for another couple of days. Switters was tempted to kiss it off, to catch it the next time it came through, which would be only two or three weeks. But then he remembered his “discovery” and rushed to get out of bed and throw his things together.

  “Dépêchez-vous!”

  “I’m hurrying. Où est Sister Domino?”

  Pippi assured him that Domino would meet him at the gate. And she did. Had it not been so abrupt, she probably wouldn’t have cried, but she had no time to prepare herself, and teardrops, one after the other, rolled like dead bees down the overturned hives of her cheeks as she explained to the astonished driver that the white-suited male (A man? Here?) in the wheelchair would be needing passage to Deir ez-Zur.

  The trucker insisted that Switters ride in the front with him and his assistant, undoubtedly as much out of curiosity—he wanted to question him—as politeness or respect. He fired up the engine and waited, with impatience and disbelief, while the crippled American and the French nun embraced.

  Domino’s smile cut like a prow through the cascading tears. “I should have no complaints,” she said with a brightness that was only half false. “I’ve known the full strong love of a man of the world and yet emerged with my maidenhood immaculate. A virgin in partu.” She tried to laugh, but there was a chirpy lump in her throat.

  “Cake and eat it,” said Switters approvingly, noticing that his own voice sounded as if it were being run along the pickets in a fence. “Listen. We never got time to talk. About the third prophecy, I mean.”

  “I know. I know. This is happening too fast. You must write me about it as soon as you can. The truck still brings our mail.” She glanced nervously at the driver.

  “No. Listen. You have to hear this. It’s not Islam.”

  “Not Islam?”

  “The word, the message that can transform the future. It isn’t going to come from Islam. It’s coming from Today Is Tomorrow.”

  “What are you talking about?” Was this dear man a nut case, after all?

  “The prophecy says the cue will be delivered from the direction of une pyramide. Not les but une. Singular. The direction of one pyramid. Don’t you recall that Today Is Tomorrow has this head . . . the man’s a living pyramid! Whatever comes out of his mouth comes from the direction of a—”

  “Ooh-la-la! This is crazy.”

  The driver sounded his horn. The assistant, standing by to help Switters into the cab and fold up his wheelchair, clapped his hands. Switters quieted them both by snarling something in colloquial Arabic, the equivalent of “Hold your fucking camels.”

  “You’d better go, my dearest,” said Domino.

  “Think about it,” Switters insisted. “The guy’s a pyramid with legs.”

  “So? He’s a savage. He’s an illiterate witch doctor. A wild primitive who lives in the forest, incommunicado.”

  “True enough. But he’s got a kind of philosophy. I’m serious. He’s got a concept. A vision. And it’s out of a pyramid, not that a pyramid per se is any—”

  “What kind of ‘philosophy’? What could he have that would—”

  “I’m not sure. I mean, it’s unique, but I only know the general outline. I’ll find out, though. If there are pertinent details, I’ll find them out when I’m there. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she sighed, unsure as to what she was agreeing to. She made a little furrow in her chin, which the tear runoff filled like rainwater in a ditch.

  The other Pachomians, one by one, had gathered at the gate to see him off. ZuZu, Pippi, Mustang Sally, both Marias, Bob. Masked Beauty was last to arrive. She wore her veil, of course, but he could detect her beauty-buster behind it, glowing like a holographic hush puppy, a glob of ghost grease in the morning sun. Holding her old body erect, august as an abbess ought to be, proud as a Matisse nude, she clasped his hand. “Tell them to limit their procreation,” she said in her flat, childish French. “Wherever you go, tell them.”

  Switters squeezed her bony fingers. He promised. Then, as the burly assistant lifted him bodily into the truck, he blew the sisterhood a round of kisses and yelled, “Save my stilts!” He yelled it again, wedged between the two truckers, as they drove away. “Au revoir! Save my stilts!”

  In the deep velvet radish of his heart, he must have realized that it was highly unlikely that he would ever see those Pippi-made stilts again, yet had he been unwilling to lie to himself, he would have been a very poor romantic, indeed. Why, he might have asked, did it seem so tricky, so difficult, to lead simultaneously a romantic life and a fully conscious one?

  During the long, rough drive—east-northeast to Deir ez-Zur (where they passed the night), south-southwest to Palmyra (where they again slept over), and on southwestward to the capital—Switters was compressed like anchovy paste in a living sandwich. The assistant, on his right, rarely spoke, but Toufic, the driver, encouraged by Switters’s earlier display of Arabic, questioned him relentlessly. A squat man, about thirty, with a lath basket of tight black curls, and soft brown eyes that leaked soul by the ounce, Toufic was a Christian (Eastern Orthodox, of course, not Roman), and as such, demanded to know what his passenger had been doing in a convent. Toufic also had relatives in the rug trade in Louisville, Kentucky, and while he himself had often dreamed of emigrating there, he was incensed over America’s recent air attacks on the innocent people of Iraq and wanted from his rider a full accounting for those bully-boy atrocities.

  Switters’s answers must have pleased him, for by the time they got to Deir ez-Zur they were conversing agreeably, and by the time they departed Palmyra they were behaving like schoolyard buddies.

  They entered Damascus (about 7 P.M., December 28) on An-Nassirah Avenue, proceeding at a slow, noisy pace to the walled old city and the Via Recta, mentioned in the Bible as the “Street of Straight,” though its straightness, like many another biblical reference, could hardly have been meant to be taken literally. The Via Recta marked the boundary of the city’s Christian quarter, and it was into that quarter that Toufic drove Switters after the other passengers and ten crates of dates had been offloaded. “For your comfort and safety,” he said, reminding Switters that they were in the middle of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting. Between sunrise and dusk, he would find nothing to eat outside the Christian quarter, and even there only in a private home. Moreover, the sacred rigors of Ramadan had intensified anti-American passions in Syria (the Iraqi bombing raids having occurred only ten days earlier), and in some parts of Damascus there were blades that would relish the wicked white butter of a Yankee throat. Luckily, Toufic and his family had a spare room to let.

  With a cough—half leaded exhaust fumes, half brazier kabob smoke—Switters accepted the offer. He trusted Toufic but regretted that Mr. Beretta lay unattended in the crocodile valise in the rear of the truck. The ex-operative was getting a wee careless in his retirement. He sighed, disgusted but not really surprised that Clinton had fallen in with the cowboys. It was an all too familiar story.

  Toufic stopped the truck, an aging deuce-and-a-half Mercedes with a canvas canopy, on a coiling side street and sounded the horn four times. With squeaks and rattles, a rickety corrugated tin door was raised, and Toufic backed the vehicle into a deep, narrow garage. Dimly lit by a pair of raw forty-watt bulbs that dangled from the stucco ceiling like polished anklebones on strings, the space smelled of motor oil, solvent, sour metals, musky rubber, and burnt gunk. Off to the right, more brightly illuminated, was a small glassed-in office occupied by three men: two standing, one seated at a cluttered wooden desk. Toufic had to go to the office to complete some paperwork. He suggested that Switters wait where he was. “I’ll be needing my valise,” said Switters, fairly pointedly.

  The assistant fetched the bag. Then he fetched brushes, rags, and a tub of soapy water and began vigorously to wash the peeling paint of the sand-and-sun-tortured truck. Through the veil of scrub water that coursed down the windshield, the naked lightbulbs reminded Switters of the lemo
ns of St. Pachomius. Their yellow blaze aggravated his headache. He shifted his gaze to the office, where Toufic was now in conversation with the others: the man at the desk, who was an older, fatter version of Toufic, and the two standing men, who, Switters noticed, wore suits and ties and European faces. Something about the pair tightened Switters’s Langley-trained eye. He squinted through the sudsy stream. He patted his valise.

  After nearly a half hour, Toufic returned, scolding the assistant for killing his truck with cleanliness. “Go home to your family,” he ordered, shooing the busy washer out the door. “We go, too,” he told Switters, and he unfolded the chair. Puzzled at how nimbly his passenger leapt from the cab into the Invacare 9000, he asked, “What did you say again was the trouble with you?”

  “Walking pneumonia.” The phrase did not translate well into Arabic.

  Toufic lived several blocks from the garage. Switters rolled along beside him through the streets of the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth. It was in this very neighborhood that the misogynist, Paul, had taken refuge after his fit on the Damascus road and formulated the structure and stricture of what would become known as Christianity. The Street of Straight, indeed. As they bumped along over the worn paving stones, Toufic, a bit embarrassed, informed Switters that he could only offer his room until early the following morning. Toufic had been assigned an unexpected driving job, and, of course, he could not leave Switters alone in his home with his wife.

  Of course not. Toufic may have been Christian, but he was nonetheless Arabic and thus subject to the sexual insecurities that among men of the Middle East achieved titanic, even earth-changing proportions; insecurities that had spawned veils, shaven heads, clitoridectomies, house arrest, segregation, macho posturing, and three major religions. The women hereabouts must have really been something! thought Switters. They must have had loins of fire, pussies of gold; their libidos must have brayed like wild asses and loomed like desert dunes. Inexhaustible, inextinguishable, inextricable, they had turned the weaker sexual animal inside out and drove him to build cultural, political, and religious walls in order to contain their deep, roiling juices; walls so steep and rigid they still stood. The Levant had no monopoly on penile insecurity: two of the world’s most magnificent creatures, the tiger and the rhinoceros, were going extinct in 1998 because Asian males believed they needed to consume the body parts of those beasts to shore their precious peckers up; and dangerously excessive population growth in many nations was due to a husbandly compulsion to publicly demonstrate virility by keeping their poor wives pregnant. Yet, it was in the Middle East that the perception of pussy whippery had manifested itself most dramatically and with the longest-lasting consequences, and Switters (who had, himself, experienced a tinge of coital frailty after Sister Fannie bolted his cot) wished he might have visited the tents of some of those lusty Semitic and pre-Semitic lasses. Had the men been ego-wounded crybabies and scaredy-cats, or were the women actually that free, that hot? In any event, you can bet he would have learned the name for their intimidating treasure in every tribal dialect.