Tagged Pages

By Tom Robbins

Switters offered a brief preamble of his own.
"Etymologically," he said, clearing that part of his throat that hadn't been cleared by the arrack, "a prophet is somebody who 'speaks for' somebody else, so I take prophecy (from the Greek, prophetes) with about the same amount of salt as I take press releases from a corporate shill. A prophet is just a self-proclaimed mouthpiece for invisible taciturn forces that allegedly control our destiny, and prophecy buffs tend to be either neurotically absorbed with their own salvation or morbidly fascinated by the prospect of impending catastrophe. Or both. A death wish on one hand, a desperate, unrealistic hope for some kind for supernatural rescue on the other."
As he undid the clasp on the envelope, she informed him that the roots of the word notwithstanding, the prophet in this case was not speaking on behalf of a higher power, was hardly God's publicist but rather, in a sense, a whistleblower, warning her beloved humanity what the Almighty had in store for it if it didn't shape up. Our Lady of Fatima, then, was a kind of spy, a mole, and operative, working behind the scenes to delay if not forestall divine retribution, scheming to buy more time for her earthly brood. Domino thought that Agent Switters, of all people, would be sympathetic.
He responded that any feeling of occupational bond with the Virgin Mary was regrettably beyond him at the moment, but he promised to keep his mind as open to Marian ideas as a convenience store was to hold-up men. Nevertheless, he believed it only fair to advise her up front that he was as leery of those who predicted the future as he was disdainful of those whom the future always promised to be real in ways that the present was not. "It's here. Today. Right now," he said.
"What is?"
"All of it."
"Today is tomorrow?"
"There you go." He flashed her a grin that could house break a walrus. Then, he opened the envelope.

"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 dammed."
"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, an 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 a 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-bushwhack. 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, obvously, 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."

The next morning he flew to Peru. Alaska Airlines to Los Angeles, then the 1:00 p.m. LAN-Chile flight to Lima, which stopped in Mexico City barely long enough for him to telephone a maverick philology professor he knew there.
Once he had gotten the parrot secured in the pressurized portion of the cargo hold that airlines set aside for passengers' pets, the departure passed smoothly. That was fortunate because the effects of the XTC had left him moderately fatigues. Settled into a business-class seat with a Bloody Mary on his tray, he bagan to feel consoled, if not actually buoyant, about the demands of the immediate future. In all honesty, he had to admit that the mission forced upon him by his crafty grandmother was a good deal less boring, potentially, that the mickey mouse assignment he's been handed at Langley. Which was not to say it would be anything beyond and inconvenience, a kind of dead-cat bounce. A couple of extra days in South America wasn't exactly going to poison all the tadpoles in his drainage ditch. He would endure.
Yes, unquestionably, he would get through a sticky, buggy, rainy, much-too-vivid side trip to the Amazon jungle. The in-flight movie, however, was another matter. It was one of those so-called action suspense pictures in which the primary suspense was the uncertainty as to whether there would be nienty seconds or a full two minutes between one massive explosion and the next. In those films the sky was seldom blue for long. Black billows, orange flame, and polychromatic geysers of flying debris filled the screen at irregular intervals, while on the soundtrack the crakc, roar, and shatter of battered matter was as common as music, although not quite so common as gunfire and wailing. Both Maestra and Suzy sometimes watched such movies because they imagined that this was what his life must be like in the Central Intelligence Agency. Silly girls.
Switters endured a half hour of it before ripping off his headset, quaffing his drink, and turning to the passenger in the next seat, a tall, wiry, sharp-featured Latino in a blue-and-white-striped seersucker suit. "Tell me, amigo," said Switters in a voice just loud enough to penetrate the fellow's earphones, "do you know you boom-boom movies are so popular? Do you know why young males, espically, love, simply love, to see things blown apart?"
The man stared blankly at Switters. He lifted his headset, but on one side only. "It's freedom," said Switters brightly. "Freedom form the material world. Subconsciously, people feel trapped by our culture's confining buildings and its relentless avalanche of consumer goods. So, when they watch all this shit being demolished in a totally irreverent and devil-may-care fashion, they experience the kind of release the Greeks used to get from their tragedies. The ecstasy of psychic liberation."
The Latino smiled, but it was not a friendly smile; it was, in fact, the sort of quasi-smile one observes on small dogs in the backseats of parked cars just before thy begin to bark hysterically and try to chew their way through the window glass. Perhaps he doesn't understand, thought Switters.
"Things. Cosas. Things attach themselves like leeches to the human soul, then they bleed out the sweetness and the music and the primordial joy of being unencumbered upon the land. Comprende? People feel tremendous pressure to settle down in some sort of permanent space and fill it up with stuff, but deep inside they resent those structures, and they're scared to death of that stuff because they know it controls them and restricts their movements. That's why they relish the boom-boom cinema. On a symbolic level, it annihilated their inanimate wardens and blows away the walls of their various traps."
Feeling loquacious now, Switters might have gone on to offer his theory on suicide bombers, to wit: Islamic terrorist groups were successful in attracting volunteer martyrs because the young men got to strap explosives on themselves and blast valuable public property to smithereens. Exilarating boom-boom power. If they were required to martyr themselves by being dragged behind a bus or sticking a wet finger in a light socket, volunteers would be few and far between.
"Incidentally," he might have added, "are you aware that there's no such thing as a smithereen? The word exists only in the plural." He said none of this, however, because the Latino had begun to grind his teeth at him. Yes, it's an odd concept, grinding one's teeth at another, but that's unmistakably what the fellow was doing: grinding them audibly, too, and so forcefully that his bushy black mustache bucked and rolled as if it were a theme-park ride for thrill-seeking tamale crumbs, leaving Switters with no choice but to pierce the grinder with what some people have described as his "fierce, hypnotic green eyes." He stared at the grinder so fiercely, if not hypnotically, that he gradually ceased to grind, swallowed hard, turned away, and avoided Switter's gaze for the rest of the journey.
Aside from that, the flight was uneventful.

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."

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.