The Televisionary Oracle (15 page)

I squatted there with my head against my knees, rocking gently and shivering with pleasure as I engorged my pure joy. It was the most strangely delicious thing I had ever tasted. The sweetness of an unfamiliar fruit exploded again and again on my front teeth and tongue and the roof of my mouth. Incredibly, its alarming hardness molted thick syrup. The shocking iciness provoked a hot, ambrosial spasm in my solar plexus. The treat was the same color as the sky, and I had an absurd flash that this was how the sky tastes high above the earth. The flavor of heaven.

Gradually I became aware that I was not alone. As the sweetness disappeared inside me I felt the presence of another body materializing—not exactly next to me; not exactly inside me; but both at the same time. It was as if there were two of us occupying a space that was big enough for just one.

“Who are you?” I beamed in the direction of this somebody. In response, I filled up with a feeling that was mine but not mine; it also belonged to a
him
. And this
him
was the same size as me, the same texture, the same bones and hair and heart—the same everything. I didn’t exactly hear but sensed a voice that was like mine but lower in pitch. “It’s me—Rumbler,” my companion telepathized brightly. “Remember?”

I was licking the last sweet blue gobs of popsicle with both of our tongues as I tried to remember.

“We were together in the warm floating dark,” he said. “Remember?”

A relaxing image rose from my heart, bobbing upwards. A memory? I was a small bird-fish suspended in gooey, salty juice. A fleshy cord emerged from my belly, rooted at its opposite end in a soft, gently throbbing wall. He was there with me, too: “Rumbler.” A cord coming out of his gut lodged in the wall near mine.

“Rub the sticks together,” I heard him say there in my cave under the picnic table. I obeyed. With him moving my right hand and me my left, I slowly swished the two popsicle sticks back and forth against each other at a right angle. After a few moments (or was it long minutes?), I heard myself talking aloud, seeing in my mind’s eye and then
murmuring aloud a story about clouds with happy pumpkin faces spitting out burning chairs which flew through a lemony sky and birthed giant flakes of snow shaped like hands. When I laughed with joy at this unwilled explosion of pictures, I felt his laugh inside mine.

It was the first, primitive outburst of a spectacle that would later evolve into a many-splendored institution. The biggest leap in its growth came a few days later, when I discovered my private power spot in the redwood husk. Ultimately I lived the stories, didn’t just behold them; I traveled to strange astral tableaux, didn’t just describe them. But one aspect of the ritual never changed: Stroking the popsicle sticks together was always the way I slipped over the threshold.

A couple of years later, when my mothers belatedly told me the uncensored story of my birth, I developed a theory that Rumbler was somehow related to or maybe even the same as the twin who had not survived the journey out of our mother’s womb. By then, that historical fact was irrelevant. He and I were best friends, not brother and sister.

I had many other allies and companions inside Melted Popsicle Land: Firenze the Musical Sasquatch, Peekaboo the Hide-and-Seek Salamander, Snapdragon Dragonfly the Firefly who could spell out riddles with her blinking light, Jujubee the Angel Ghost Clown who brought me healthy candy, Itchy Crunchy the Beautiful Empress of the Trolls, G’Fretzus and G’Freckles the twin ticklers who always taught me new tricks about how to dream while I was awake, Sphinxie Spanky the Good Troublemaker, Jelly Kelly the Funny Bunny who showed me how to change my size and shape in the twinkle of an eye, and many others.

But Rumbler was my most special friend, and the one with whom I exchanged the most surprises. Sometimes, it’s true, I couldn’t actually
see
him. He was a kind of ghost who shared my body, a shadow whose spicy, aerated, mercurial texture moved around inside me. Other times, though, he lived quite distinctly outside of me, a vividly separate creature. Not exactly my twin: a little shorter than me, a little younger in spirit, a less furrowed brow and shorter hair. But his face, I thought, looked much like mine would if I were a boy, and his loping walk and strong, expressive hands were my doubles.

As I think back to those days now, I’m remembering the times he played the game “I Love You Honey, But I Just Can’t Make You Laugh.”
It would start whenever he thought I was taking myself too seriously. He’d suddenly appear hanging upside-down from a cactus-cloud or riding backwards on a fairy elephant, and with a totally straight face except for maybe a saccharinely sympathetic eyebrow he’d say, “I love you honey, but I just can’t make you laugh.” And I would of course immediately collapse in an implosion of guffaws.

I probably would have left the Earth at an early age without Rumbler and my home-away-from-home on the other side of the veil. My heart would have broken to death, or my subconscious mind would have invoked a disease like leukemia or muscular dystrophy to relieve me of my suffering. Melted Popsicle Land was a life-saver.

Not enough of a life-saver to allow me to forgive my mothers their sins against me, however. As I grew older, I became a rageaholic. Not that I ever showed it. How could I? I had no right. I had no excuse. I was showered with more blessings than any child in the history of the world. A multitude of spacious and beautiful homes in the country. All the toys and gadgets and books and companionship I could possibly want. Not just two doting parents, but seven, each of whom was—I think this even now—a highly accomplished, intensely expressive soul who would have been intriguing to me even if she weren’t my mother.

And sweet Mary Magdalen, how strong and capable my moms were making me. How confident and radiant. I mastered algebra before my eleventh birthday and was sufficiently knowledgeable to discourse at length on quantum physics, English literature, and the shamanic tradition by age twelve. I could enact the entire ritual of the Eleusinian Mysteries, playing all the roles, and I knew both the intricate theory of the music of the spheres and the story of how Pythagoras had ripped it off from our ancient order. It’s true I didn’t know squat about the pantheon of Disney characters or the current Top 40 hit songs—pop culture was at least ignored and at most forbidden at the Pomegranate Grail—but I could compose duets for the violin, write complex and entertaining short stories, and perform forty yoga asanas with impeccable grace. Most precocious of all, I could meditate up a storm. My talent for concentration was heroic, my ability to induce alpha- and theta-state trance was legendary, and I had on numerous occasions
provided incontrovertible proof of my power to read minds and perform psychokinetic tricks. Maybe someday you’d like to see me make the little bronze fox in the moon lodge spin around without touching it.

These last skills were handy in helping me execute the perfect punishment on my loving oppressors.

I remember the moment my brilliant plan first hatched. It was on the summer solstice shortly after my eleventh birthday. My seven mothers had convened the kind of Big Deal get-together they liked to do every six weeks, on each of the cross-quarter holidays of the year (solstices and equinoxes and the power points in between). Check-Ins, they called them. This was where they all assembled in one place with me, usually in the ritual room in my tower, to give me pep talks, evaluate my progress (sometimes with surreptitious tests), and gently pound into me reminders of the big picture I was supposed to be mastering.

The number-one topic on the agenda that day was the glorious and happy event that awaited me in the not-too-distant future: my menarche. It was not as if I hadn’t heard the facts about the peach flower flow before. But this presentation was special. My mothers were uniformly adorned in miles of red silk gowns I had never seen before. Big scarlet circles graced their cheeks in apparent violation of the unspoken prejudice in our community against make-up. Their smell was unfamiliar, almost alien: what I would now describe as musky and sulfurous.

Vimala spoke in hushed tones of the mysterious transformations that would soon begin to work their magic inside my body. Sibyl regaled me with old myths and folktales about the origin of the marvelous gift that the female of the species had been blessed with. Artemisia told me of the deep awakening to holy gnosis she’d had on the day when she herself had crossed the threshold from girlhood to womanhood.

Not too many months later I discovered the other side of the menstrual story—how the phallocrats had always called our gift a “curse”—but on this occasion, the guardians of the Santa Cruz chapter of the Pomegranate Grail waxed with unqualified rapture about the joys and privileges I would soon know.

Fascinated as I was by their song and dance, I could not suppress my congenital urge to find some rib to tickle, some sacred cow to tip.
As always, I was two minds working simultaneously. One felt reverent gratitude for the soul-stirring show my mothers were putting on for me. The other was desperate for a laugh in the midst of all the sickeningly calm and poised solemnity.

Finally my searchlight imagination landed on a ripe spot: the complaint I’d been nursing forever and for which I’d never found a satisfying outlet. All those years I’d harbored my protest against the way I’d been carved into an idol, and all those years I’d never managed to retaliate with any act that matched, in its ability to inflict poetic justice, the unfairness of the wrongs I’d suffered. My little rebellious pranks—even the time I set fire to a dogshit-filled paper bag on Artemisia’s porch, rang her bell, and ran away—were harmless, really, and usually ignored anyway.

And—who knows, maybe because I am an avatar after all, with a backlog of smarts and integrity built up over many incarnations, including one as Mary Fucking Magdalen—I never even considered carrying out any revenge that would stunt my own growth. Refusing to master algebra or Greek or temple dancing, in other words, was not an option. I may have wished from time to time that I could spend more time playing in the garden and less studying the esoteric myths of Persephone, but more often than not I was quite pleased to be in my classroom. I
was
hungry for knowledge and powers. I was driven by a fierce and almost impersonal ambition to be excellent at everything I did.

But now, finally, here on the summer solstice, I found a way to mess with my mothers’ perfect program without hurting myself. As Cecily extolled the part that the metaphor of menstruation would play in the redemption of the planet, I decided, in a bolt of lucidity, that I simply would not menstruate. Would never even start. Would rejoice secretly in my heart as I watched my mothers’ faces grow long and sad. Best of all, would pretend I was an innocent victim of the Goddess’ inexplicable stroke of fate.

It’s not completely honest to say I conjured up this revolution all by myself. Rumbler was there with me, spurring me on. That was a big surprise. Though I had had adventures with him in dreams, until that time he’d never shown up anywhere else outside the confines of Melted Popsicle Land. In fact, I’d become accustomed to believing
that he was not able to contact me when I was in my mothers’ realm. Their vibes were too thick and protective for him to penetrate. Or something.

Yet there he was, and right when I needed him, too. My heart was two hearts. I felt twice as strong as usual, twice as smart and brave. It wasn’t like he gave me the idea to refuse menstruation; it was my own. But I think if he hadn’t been there, I might have downplayed or ignored the brainstorm. He gave me the spark to act on it.

My (our?) plan was full-grown from the moment it bloomed. I would simply extend the power I had already developed to modify the autonomic functions of my body. For more than four years, my mothers had been teaching me to regulate my breath, slow my heart beat, and relax my nervous system. I’d done lots of biofeedback and could slip into the alpha state virtually on command. I’d practiced a technique which supposedly sped up the healing of my various childhood cuts and bruises, and my mothers were convinced that I’d become adept at it beyond their wildest expectations. In the past fifteen months, they’d even begun to teach me alchemical secrets they said had never been revealed to anyone under the age of forty in the history of their ancient order. Like for instance: how to digest my food so as to extract the
potable gold
that most people excrete in their shit. I won’t gross you out with the laboratory details of how my doting mothers determined that I was succeeding at this magical task.

In that moment, with my red silk-clad mommies gathered around me on the summer solstice, I wasn’t sure precisely what to do in order to postpone my menarche indefinitely. But I was absolutely certain I could figure out how.

I set to work the next day. As I’d been taught to do in the face of any difficult problem, I set up a three-pronged attack: analysis, meditation, and dream-quest. I studied up on the physiology of the female reproductive system till I could picture every detail of its operation. With my inner eye and proprioceptive nerves, I divined the specific shape and location of my own organs. Next I launched a series of meditations and prayers to plumb for the exact information I would need to carry out my desire. Finally, I devised a dream incubation quest.

There was a slight obstacle. Our ancient order teaches that meditation and prayer are at best useless and at worst rife with distortions
when applied towards a goal that is purely selfish. And I firmly believed that, as I still do. Could I therefore twist and tweak the mission somehow so it would be morally correct? Something other than my petty and infantile rejection of my mothers’ hopes?

The answer surprised me. It came in my very first meditation. The still small voice rising up from the supernal depths said, with no ambiguity, something like the following: “Unless you are completely united with the goal of serving as the avatar of the Pomegranate Grail, there is no use even trying to fulfill that goal. Therefore, you should either renounce the goal for good, or find a way to embrace it wholeheartedly—by any means necessary.”