The Televisionary Oracle Page 4

  After work she pedaled straight to the oak tree where the diary lay nestled in a fork of branches some twenty feet up. While perched up there, she read his most recent entry, dated just hours before. It said something like this:

  “Ascetic Dionysian with idiot-savant tendencies seeks flexible doll-maker with crafty riffs for experiments in organized chaos. Guzzle my poetry, baby, and I’ll be your disciplined wacko. Trick me with your cunning stunts and I will taste you all over with my forked tongue. Scavenging tonight? Meet me here at 9:03 P.M. and we’ll go raid the witch’s garden. Wear your costume from 39 in Grimms’.”

  What made Jerome’s insanity even more insane was that he was so precise, so punctual, so perfectionist, and not at all in the compulsive way that schizophrenics sometimes have. His exactness was very relaxed. You could be sure that the peculiar time for their date, 9:03, had a baroque numerological import for him, and you also knew that he’d be there not a minute later. Yet he didn’t mind if you were late, and he never harangued you with the cosmology of it all.

  Magda was there early, having enjoyed an afternoon nap to compensate for the sleep she’d probably be missing later that night. Thanks to a visit to the Bargain Barn, a used clothing warehouse where clothes sold for twenty cents a pound, she’d assembled “a costume from 39 in Grimms’.” That seemingly cryptic reference in Jerome’s note was no mystery to Magda. She’d known to turn to page 39 in her edition of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, where she found the story of Rapunzel. What it all meant, she knew, was that Jerome was enlisting her, as he had on numerous occasions, in another one of his “mythic reconnaissance missions” in preparation for an attempt at “mutating the old imprints.”

  Jerome was a writer of fairy tales. He was convinced, in fact, that his stories were to be his greatest gift to humanity. He wasn’t so intent, though, on creating new myths from scratch as he was of messing with the old standards. Long before the word “deconstructionism” became a shibboleth for academic elites, Jerome used it to describe his modus operandi. If traditional stories and myths were records of the outdated patterns that characterized the collective unconscious long ago, Jerome wanted to be the one who disrupted those moldy patterns and rearranged them into fresh imprints more conducive to creating the utopia that he staunchly believed was humanity’s destiny.

  At 9:03 Magda was under the oak tree dressed as a German peasant woman might have dressed in the thirteenth century—if, that is, she’d had access only to the Bargain Barn: long muslin dress over grey leggings, brown suede vest and faux leather work boots. Jerome’s outfit was more authentic: the materials of his shirt and tights were made of extremely rough tan fibers, and his primitively sewn leather boots were a throwback. Where’d he get them? Chances are he’d try to make you believe he’d somehow managed to smuggle them back over the dimensional threshold from fifteenth-century France.

  “What if in the new, updated version of Rapunzel,” Jerome said conspiratorially as he hugged Magda in welcome, “the witch never catches the husband in the act of stealing the lettuce?”

  “Then you wouldn’t have much of a story left,” Magda retorted sensibly. “In fact, you might as well say, ‘They all lived happily ever after, the end’ after that.”

  “Ah, but wait. Let’s theorize that the witch’s garden represents the mystical knowledge of herbs, the old wise woman lore passed down from mother to daughter since before the beginning of history. And what if in the new version of ‘Rapunzel,’ the husband scales the walls of the witch’s sanctum and brings its delicious secrets back to his wife—again and again. Let’s say the witch, the guardian of the old womanly ways, never stops him. Maybe she never even notices. Or maybe she notices and still decides to let him do it. Maybe she says to herself, if this man is so devoutly in service to his wife’s needs, then I will allow him access to the old wisdom. I will permit him to become mediator between crone and maiden.”

  Jerome was a man out of time. The cultural trends of his historical era brushed up against him, but his dearest passions were fed by the madnesses and fetishes of other eras and places. He was also, in a curious sense, a man of action. It was true that when he was in his learning mode he could close his eyes in broad daylight and remain virtually motionless for hours while he traveled hundreds of years and thousands of miles away. But when he was in his creative mode, working on one of his mutated fairy tales, he needed to create rituals in this time and this place. Maybe it was the Aeschylus in him—he believed that in another incarnation he was the ancient Greek playwright—that compelled him to dramatize his ideas in order to explore them. There was something about physically recreating the conditions of the story he was deconstructing that aroused buried reserves of inspiration.

  A half hour later, after pedaling their beat-up bikes a couple miles to the spot Jerome had selected for his “mythic reconnaissance mission,” the two crouched at the foot of a stone wall that surrounded a garden and a cottage with one light on. Jerome motioned for Magda to hop on his back and peer over the wall. After she did, he eased her down.

  “You know what to say, wife,” Jerome whispered.

  “Oh husband,” Magda said without hesitation, “In that garden is a bed of ripe rapunzel greens. They look so fresh and delicious that my mouth is watering. I simply must have some to eat. I think I shall die if I don’t.”

  “I cannot let my wife die of longing,” Jerome said. “I will bring you some of that rapunzel, no matter what the cost.”

  He clambered up over the wall. In a few minutes he returned with a wad of freshly picked spinach. Magda wolfed it down and lay her head in Jerome’s lap. After a few minutes of silence, she spoke.

  “Oh husband, I cannot stop thinking of that rapunzel. It was so good, so very good, that my craving for it has grown. Please, I beg you, fetch me some more.”

  Jerome paid a second visit to the garden and brought back another handful of spinach. Again, Magda gorged herself. But minutes later, her yearning returned yet again. “I am famished for rapunzel, my love. It seems the more I eat, the more I want. Don’t make me wait.”

  Jerome leaped over the wall again, and this time, instead of slinking and skulking, he stood up, faced the cottage, and waved his arms. Did a jig. Sang an excerpt of the Hallelujah Chorus. And then snitched some spinach and returned to Magda. This time she only pretended to eat. The fairy tale wife might still be fascinated with the taste of rapunzel, but the actress needed a break from the spinach. The green leaves got stuffed in the waistband of her leggings.

  “Husband,” she said as she massaged his shoulders and neck, “My hunger for rapunzel has become so wild that I can no longer contain it. I beg you now to become hungry for rapunzel yourself. For only if you eat the rapunzel until it is gone can my own hunger ever be satisfied.”

  Jerome pulled his wife’s long dress up above her waist and kissed her just below her navel. Then he heaved himself over the garden wall. Taking a small notepad and pen out of his pocket, he wrote the following: “Dear Witch: Thank you for helping us to change history. With your gracious permission, I have fetched my wife so much of your rapunzel that I, too, have become hungry for it. Now there is no longer any need to protect my daughter from me, for I have renounced the ignorance of my gender and the sins of the fathers. With deep reverence, Rapunzel’s Daddy.”

  Jerome strode up to the cottage and slid the note under the back door. Returning to the garden, he plucked the remaining spinach and carried it back to where Magda lay. Slowly and methodically, he chewed and swallowed it all.

  “Shall we consecrate the mutation, wife?” he said. Licking her forehead once, he removed her vest, pulled her dress over her head, undid her boots, and shimmied off her leggings. Then he lay back passively while she performed the same ritual on him. As she finished and lay down next to him, he said, “Nope. Got to give our love to the promised land. Come on.”

  He urged her over the garden wall. Once there, she took his hand and led him to the pumpkin patch. Under the scarecrow, h
e sat on the soft, damp night earth and she settled down on his lap. There for the next how many minutes—the time it took for the two-days-past-full moon to slither from behind the hill yonder to the top branch of the apple tree in the garden—they did the eye-fucking game. Tip of lingam lightly poised against tip of clitoris, no penetration except their amused and hallucinating eyes, slinging dusky amber light back and forth, fantasizing daimons and elemental spirits flowing from each other’s nerves, wishing nothing else but that this moment be what it was.

  By the time the moon reached the lowest leafy cloud, lingam and yoni had begun to blend, no official moment of entry but only a slow misty merger of yoni electrons and lingam electrons. In this happy-birthday-for-all-sentient-beings, the mask of Jerome’s face glowed transparent for Magda, overflowing with a fountain of momentary portraits—of Aeschylus, perhaps, and Jesus’ brother James, and Jack of Beanstalk fame; but also every man that had ever motivated Magda—that brush-cut warlock with the broken nose who taught her yoga, the fourth-grade teacher who told her she was a good artist, the smart boy she loved in second grade, the face of Jesus in the painting on her Child’s Book of the Bible, the doctor who caught her as she pulsed free of her mother’s yoni, her brother, her father.

  Never any pressure to “fuck” or “screw” with Magda and Jerome. The mingling, not the friction, was the Grail. If alchemy meant anything, it meant this cooking, this slow, simmering mesh of why and how. As Magda steamed and marinated his prima materia, Jerome found leopards in her face, quetzalcoatls, the Queen of the Faeries, his mother and grandmothers, his old girlfriend, Billie Holiday, the woman who had served him ice cream every day of the summer of his ninth year.

  And then … who was that last face? He lifted his trance eyes away to find the moon, then looked back. It was still there, shimmering like all the others, but more solid.

  Mary Magdalen. The wife of his brother Jesus. A face—unlike the others that were coruscating through his wife-goddess’ eyes—that he felt himself retreat from. Not from lack of love, but from absence of gnosis—as if he weren’t old enough, or smart enough. He wanted to love her, but didn’t know how. As James, he had always felt shy and strongly drawn to her. Taboo.

  He felt an infinitesimal gush in his lingam: a small, partial ejaculation—a safety-valve release which he, as a conscientious tantric lover, had trained himself to have so as to avoid a shoot-the-whole-wad explosion.

  Feeling the need to anchor himself, to come down a little, he lifted his hands from where they’d been resting on Magda’s hips and brought them to her face.

  “Magda,” he croaked, his voice rusty.

  “Magdalen,” she replied.

  “Magdalen?” he whispered.

  “Jesus has changed his mind,” she spoke softly but firmly. It wasn’t exactly Magda’s voice. Huskier even than her usual sex voice.

  “Jesus wants me to tell you. That what he said before. No longer applies.”

  “No longer applies,” Jerome repeated. He knew what she was talking about but wasn’t sure he was ready to know.

  “Jesus says that he wants you to have a child—a real, physical child.”

  “But I haven’t become my own child yet. I haven’t reproduced myself.”

  “There’s not enough time for that luxury any more. Jesus needs you—and I need you—to help us.”

  “I want to help you,” Jerome said bravely. Magda’s yoni muscles had begun a series of rippling squeezes, and though the temptation to ejaculate had been partially relieved by his mini-orgasm, he could feel his pleasurably diffused sexual charge starting to contract again towards his lingam. He resisted, concentrating on spiraling the energy back out to the top of his head and the ends of his fingers and toes. He exerted his will, trying to draw his attention away from the tingling confusion he’d felt since Mary Magdalen had begun to speak through Magda.

  “I want to be alive in your time,” she said. “I NEED to be alive in your time.”

  Suddenly he felt a burst of sweetness, the promise of an exotic species of orgasm he’d never negotiated before, at the center of his brain.

  “I want you to reincarnate me as your child.”

  A loop of honeyed lightning swooped from that whirlagig spot in his brain, traveling down his spine to his lingam and back. Maybe ten times the loop circulated, building a charge as it sluiced. It was like the feeling of soaring higher and higher on a swing, and he couldn’t see who was pushing him higher and higher but he liked it but he was dangerously high and couldn’t control himself and then he was flying off the swing and swirling down the longest slickest slide on the biggest playground he’d ever seen. Magda was clutching webs of skin on either side of his abdomen and she was somehow with him slithering down this long silver slick tunnel. Firecrackers were singing inside violet waterfalls. Strawberry cream was splashing down his throat forever but thank you he wasn’t drowning, only breathing a pink river. He could see his grandfathers and his great-grandfathers barreling towards him with arms outstretched as if to welcome him or grab him, but then they were shooting by him, shouting some joyful greeting he couldn’t understand. As Jerome and Magda fell—now, somehow, they were falling up—Jerome could feel himself soften at the edges, unravel, dismantle. It was a sweet sensation, like falling asleep as a child. The night peeled away, exposing a strange sky teeming with winking, teasing stars. There was almost no space between the stars. They were nestling up against each other as far as he could see, like the jam-packed nest of throbbing frog eggs he’d once seen at the edge of the creek. He imagined that each of these billions of pulsing lights was an intelligent creature, and that they all loved him and were happy to see him and wanted to show him something very funny and very interesting.

  Gradually he became aware of the wet dirt of the garden chilling his butt and of his swollen but soft lingam drooping out of Magda’s yoni. The moon had reached zenith. Magda’s eyes were fluttering gently as if in REM sleep, though she was still upright on his lap and drumming her fingers playfully against his sides.

  “You came inside me?” she laughed quizzically. “I’m shocked.”

  “Not half as shocked as I.”

  “Should I go hurry run home and douche this load out of me?” she offered.

  “No, let’s go to Golden West and eat some buckwheat pancakes. Did you get paid today? I’m suddenly starving.”

  Nine months from the night in the rapunzel patch, in the dead of a full moon night in mid-May—a time celebrated by some as the Buddha’s birthday—my wet, feathery Rapunzel head bobbed twice at the threshold where Magda was cracking open, and then I splashed out in a flood of blood and amniotic juice, falling into the weathered hands of an old bird-woman. My father, his shoulder snug against the bird-woman’s, laughed for a long time.

  I am not describing a scene recounted to me by the three who attended my birth. I am not speculating that this is how it happened. Through my training in the occult art of anamnesia, I have lifted the veil of forgetfulness which, for most people, remains closed until death. I remember—not in words, of course, but in fuzzy images, in vivid smells, in telepathic textures—I remember that my father kissed me on the forehead as I took my first breath. I remember I was an inside-out star drinking in the smells of sweat and alcohol and camphor and shit and jasmine candles.

  And I remember my father holding me, my umbilicus just cut, as I nodded expectantly towards the moist, shivering gate out of which I had just emerged. More to come, I knew. Still inside was the creature I had swum with for my first nine moons, my twin brother. Our separation hurt, blotted out the other separation from my mother. Why was I here and he was still there?

  When finally the gate opened again, it was not with his head, but with the sac of nourishment I’d fed from, my placenta. The bird-woman stiffened at this, squawked an alarm, and grabbed two long silver scalpels. Cutting through my mother’s skin and muscles and membranes, she plumbed for my companion.

  Years after this event, when I’d learn
ed enough words, I could describe what technically happened: abruptio placenta, the premature separation of my brother’s placenta from the uterus. We were both supposed to be born before either placenta popped out. The appearance of mine while he was still inside meant that his placenta was peeling away from its source, depriving him of oxygen before he was ready to breathe.

  That’s what I know now. Then I knew only that my companion hurt. I felt him shrinking, fighting, stiffening—and then withdrawing. Even as my father put me down on a soft, white place to help the bird-woman, I sensed my Other leaving. I smelled or tasted or felt his growing absence. And with an unmistakable act of will—any expert will tell you a newborn infant has no will, but I’m telling you I made a clear decision—I swallowed my brother. I ate him up so he couldn’t disappear. On his way out of this world, some diamond mist that was him—a sweet-tasting cloud with a pomegranate red heart pulsing at its center—slid down my throat and joined me in secret marriage. Since then I have always had two hearts.

  The earth body of my brother, which I never saw again after that day, was, I have always imagined, perfect—as mine was not. The loss of him was of course not the cause of my three shining flaws, but I thought otherwise for many years.

  My three shining flaws. My loves. My wounds. My treasures.

  One flaw was visible to all, a beacon and magnet for anyone excited and repulsed by an otherwise beautiful girl with a grotesque disfigurement. In the middle of my forehead, exactly in that spot where Hindu women draw the dot to mark the mythical third eye, was a large, dramatic birthmark. It was—no other way to name it—a bull skull, a more squat version of those shapes Georgia O’Keefe always painted. It was a big, ugly, radiant brown oval with horns, the left horn slightly longer than the right.