Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

by Tom Robbins

  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 V
atican 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 shad
ow 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.