The Televisionary Oracle (68 page)

I glance over at the stone and mud television—excuse me, the Televisionary Oracle—as Wealthy Anarchist talks. The screen now shows the top half of a naked woman sitting behind a news desk and holding a sheaf of papers, as if she were a newscaster. With voluminous auburn hair and bushy eyebrows, she looks like she could be Rapunzel’s twin sister—except for a few other details. She has blue skin, for instance. And eight arms, like some swarming Hindu goddess. Her body seems to be on fire in places, though she shows no signs of alarm. And every now and then she thrusts her impossibly long tongue down and out to the bottom of her chin.

This is not a cartoon or computer animation. The blue goddess appears absolutely real, as does her towering gold crown, which is surmounted by what looks like a sentient eye.

“Thank you, Wealthy Anarchist,” Jumbler is saying. “Our next Fuckfriend is a forty-two-year-old painter who claims to be a direct descendant of William Blake’s housekeeper and a junk dealer who once punched Charles Darwin in the nose. She regularly dreams she’s a tree with its roots brushing the sky and its branches nuzzling the moles and worms. Believe it or not, she also claims to be a close personal acquaintance of the magic bunny rabbit eyes that watch you around the clock in the mirror attached to the ladder to the underworld you built inside your dreams when you were five years old! Code-named Personal Growth Addict, she was recently elected to serve as Keeper of the Mysteries of the Difference Between Wise Pain and Dumb Pain.”

It’s Artemisia, the menstrual minstrel. She has clamped red rubber clown noses over her nipples, and her thick brown pubic hair is manicured in the shape of a bull skull.

“I’ve eaten food without imagining the hands of the people who grew it and picked it,” she begins with mock mournfulness, her eyes downcast and her posture slumped. “I’ve loved my own pain more than everyone else’s pain. I have sought out the most unoriginal sins
and cultivated the most boring problems. Do you love me yet?”

As she asks that question she turns her eyes up and gazes at me with demure fervor, pouting her lips and winking. Many of her compatriots around the room are giggling.

“I’ve gotten free cable by hooking into the main line illegally,” she continues, averting her eyes again and drumming her fingers against her belly. “I’ve bragged that a priest said I would burn in hell when he didn’t. I’ve failed to ridicule humorless authorities whose dogmas I agreed with. I’ve underlined all the important passages in
TV Guide
and secretly fantasized that life after the apocalypse would be more interesting. Do you love me yet? DO YOU LOVE ME YET? DO YOU LOVE ME YET?!!!!”

As Personal Growth Addict giggles out her final refrain, she leaps out of her chair and skips over. Before I can respond, she straddles me where I sit on Rapunzel’s lap, jamming her breasts against my face.

Jumbler is quick to intervene. “Not allowed to unduly influence the contestant with heated displays of physical affection,” she says sharply as she fights to peel Artemisia off me. “Against the rules.”

Meanwhile, however, Rapunzel is swaying back and forth as she tries to tickle me in the ribs. When Jumbler yanks Artemisia off my lap, all four of us barely avoid toppling over.

Once Fuckfriend number two is led back to her chair, Rapunzel gestures to Jumbler to fetch the mud and stone TV against the wall. She does, setting it on the table where I’m sitting. It apparently does not rely on electricity to function.

The screen still shows the blue goddess with eight arms sitting behind a news desk. I say “screen,” but it is much more than that. It’s as if another dimension or two has been crammed into the usual three, and somehow depicted on a two-dimensional surface. The screen doesn’t even look solid. More like a small vat of liquid crystalline mercury. The images roil and swarm as if bubbling up from a cauldron. I start to reach out to touch it, but Rapunzel grabs my hand and places it on her thigh.

“For our final Fuckfriend,” Jumbler announces, “we have a special treat. Code-named Philosopher Queen of the Underworld of Fun and Games, she is celebrating her sixty-sixth million, two hundred fifty-fifth thousand, one hundred thirty-seventh birthday today! I don’t
think there’ll be any argument when I describe her as the planet Earth’s most primordial tantric janitor! Not to mention that she’s by far the most experienced virgin in this or any other dimension, and when I say virgin I of course don’t mean sexually naive but rather complete unto herself. Needs no other Fuckfriend to be happy, really, but enjoys liaisons now and then nonetheless.

“And now, riding the fallopian holograms direct from a permanent yet secret orgasm just north of all our medulla oblongatas, I’m proud to present for your approval the Philosopher Queen of the Underworld of Fun and Games!”

Rapunzel twists a knob shaped like a five-pointed star at the bottom of the Televisionary Oracle. The sounds of music and speech emerge, as does—am I hallucinating?—a wave of aromas.

“This is a perfect moment,” the blue goddess murmurs in a voice that is soothing and thrilling at the same time, reassuring yet full of insinuation. The music playing in the background is a weave of women’s voices. It’s like a Gregorian chant sung with the lush and dissonant harmonies of Bulgarian choral music.

The smells emanating from the blue goddess have a rich and piercing effect as well. How to describe them? The English language is stingy in providing words to capture odors. Citronella is one strain in the mix. Cognac. The inside of a new car. Vanilla. The liquid acne medication I used as a teenager. A new box of crayons.

This cacophony of fragrance penetrates my head through my nose but does not stop there. It snakes down and out in all directions, as if my entire body were filling up with a sweet, earthy, liquid smoke. The feeling is unmistakably erotic, yet not in any way I recognize.

“This is a perfect moment,” the blue goddess singsongs, “because I’m stoking up my most healing pathologies for you. I’m getting ready to unhex all the black magic you’ve practiced on yourself—if that’s what you want.”

A fresh wave of aromas invades me, circulating in figure eights from the spot behind my nose down to my thighs and back: warm maple syrup blended with menthol and sandalwood and freshly cut grass and piles of linen.

“I’m practicing,” the blue goddess continues, “so I can get better at being your invisible playmate and your anarchistic anima and the
anonymous celebrity who lives under your bed—if that’s what you want.

“I’m doing everything I can to turn myself into the menstruating coyote angel helper who wants everything that you want—if that’s what you want.

“So. What
do
you want, anyway?”

Pervaded by the exotic aromas, agitated in a most soothing way by her voice, thrilled by her beautiful face and the flames flitting harmlessly on her voluptuous blue breasts, I am in a state of grace and emergency. My entire body is doing a perfectly extrapolated imitation of what it feels like for the male sexual organ to go from tumescent to erect. I do not just have a hard-on. I
am
a hard-on.

“Be specific,” the blue goddess encourages. “Tell me everything. What exactly would you like more than anything?”

I surprise myself with how simple my response is. It’s a formulation that makes me feel once again as if I’m channeling the Irish bard: “I want to be the man behind the woman who overthrows the world.”

“The choice has been made!” Jumbler spouts, jumping over to shake my hand.

What’s she talking about? I appreciate the way the blue goddess has enhanced my already altered state, but I’m not quite ready yet to select her over the other two contenders. In fact, I might prefer an actual woman to a disembodied image.

“My fellow shamanatrixes,” Jumbler rants excitedly, “in an unexpectedly snap decision, Osiris has chosen Fuckfriend number three to be his dream date! The Philosopher Queen of the Underworld of Fun and Games! Thank you so much, Wealthy Anarchist and Personal Growth Addict, for lending your exuberant grace to our proceedings.” She twists a dial on the Televisionary Oracle, pumping up the volume of the Bulgarian Gregorian chant music.

“I protest!” Artemisia shouts out suddenly. “I appeal! The Philosopher Queen hypnotized him with her smellovisionary beams! She cheated!”

Artemisia hurls herself across the floor and yanks me free of Rapunzel. In seconds she has pushed me to the floor and locked me in a wrestling hold. I’m on my back. Her chest is pressed down on mine while her left arm coils around my neck and her right arm is looped through my crotch.

“You’re my love bitch!” she yowls. “Say it! Say it! Say ‘I’m your love bitch.’ ” She has her hand close to a very sensitive part of my anatomy, and I’m in no position to resist.

“I am your love bitch,” I shout. “I swear I am your love bitch.”

“He is not! He is not your love bitch!” Wealthy Anarchist leaps into the fray, tugging hard on my arm in an effort to drag me away from Artemisia. “He’s my candy sucker.”

The two women are using me to play tug-of-war. Artemisia is yanking on my right leg and Wealthy Anarchist on my left arm.

“What the Hades are you talking about?” Artemisa screams with gruff laughter. “What’s a candy sucker?”

“A psychic told me he and I have a special destiny,” Wealthy Anarchist shrieks back. “Together we will set the world’s record for longest time a cherry Life Saver is kept intact while passed between two people’s mouths. Fifty-seven hours! We’ll be famous!”

I catch a glimpse of Jumbler and Rapunzel standing side by side a few feet away. With goofy grins on their faces, they’re clapping rhythmically.

“Love bitch, candy sucker,” they chant. “Love bitch, candy sucker, love bitch, candy sucker.”

From behind them, drowning them out, comes a series of high-pitched cackling caws. It’s the Asian woman, who follows her crow calls with a shouted announcement: “No one even asked me if I wanted to be a Fuckfriend!” She maneuvers towards me, pinwheeling her arms and unleashing shoulder-high karate kicks that barely avoid hitting some of the other women. Finally, she throws herself down to the ground near me, landing softly in a position from which she could do push-ups if she so desired.

“As the duly-elected Rabid Nibbler of The Eater of Cruelty,” she bellows, “I hereby claim the right to bite the lesbian man’s gluteus maximus!” She clamps her teeth on my butt, not hard enough to break the skin but strong enough to send half-pleasurable, half-painful ripples through me.

Meanwhile, Artemisia and Wealthy Anarchist continue to struggle for supremacy, dragging me this way and that. The Asian martial artist follows along, sometimes letting go and chomping down at a fresh location on my hindquarters.

The woman with the scar on her cheek and the big witch nose comes forward to stake a claim. Kneeling at my head, she grabs me by the hair and peers down into my face.

“How do you identify a bull dyke?” she demands to know.

“What?” I laugh.

“How do you identify a bull dyke?” she repeats more loudly and slowly.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I sputter above the noise and confusion.

“She kick-starts her vibrator and rolls her own tampons,” she reveals, pulling my hair back and forth a few times in punishment for my ignorance.

“When you order a Bloody Mary, how can you tell if the waitress is mad at you?” she asks, giving me a chance to redeem myself.

“I give up.”

“She leaves the string in.”

“Of course, I should have known.”

“How can you tell a Polish woman is having her period?”

“Don’t know.”

“She’s only wearing one sock, of course.”

She bends her head down and begins kissing my face tenderly. “As clever as you are, honey, I’m afraid you need an intelligence upgrade,” she whispers between smooches. “I’m going to have to smother you with IQ-boosting joy bombs.”

A short, thin Arab woman with wire-rimmed glasses joins the crowd. Her first act is to sip the trickle of blood leaking from the spot below my navel. Then she takes a deep breath, presses her mouth against my skin, and blows a big, sloppy, trumpet-like sound. Again and again she performs this music. Liberal amounts of her spit accumulate on my skin.

Another shamanatrix, the Eskimo-African woman, shoves her face right up against Witch Nose’s face. Only she’s not kissing, she’s talking.

“You’ve got to promise me that you will always be unpredictable but trustworthy, OK?” she prods. “Mysterious but loyal. OK? Ever-fresh and a little tricky but kind and thoughtful, too. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

I nod.

“I want you to communicate clearly,” she says, “but always keep me guessing what your next move is going to be. Promise me. Resurrect the beauty. Resurrect the masculine beauty. Promise me.”

Witch Nose covers my mouth with hers as I try to say, “I promise.” This prompts Eskimo-African to scold, “Say ‘I promise’ into
my
mouth, too.”

She gently shoves Witch Nose out of the way, then covers my lips with hers and mumbles, “Promise me.” Which I do. Witch Nose moves on to kissing my neck and shoulder.

The large young lesbian arrives at the pile-up for a piece of the action. She grabs my free hand and places my thumb firmly in her mouth.

“My thumbsuckomancy reveals,” she prophesies after taking my digit back out, “that in the future this new menstruator will be famous with the Goddess for his ability to awaken masculine mojo in the female psyche. He will not be threatened in the least when women are strong, but will in fact be totally turned on by it.”

She thrusts the thumb back in for another divination. “Ah, best of all. He will master the impossible art of achieving rapture without losing his desire. Of surrendering to climax and still wanting more.”

This announcement rouses the excitement in the room to a new pitch. Whoops and cheers break out.

“So does this mean,” gushes the fiftyish pixie, “that once he’s done seducing me he won’t lose interest? Does this mean he understands it’s his holy duty to propitiate the edge where satiation and longing co-exist?”

“Orgasm without ejaculation,” the lesbian says jubilantly. “He’ll learn how different they are. I predict he’ll learn that his bliss can go on forever when he doesn’t give in to the urge to splurge.”