The Televisionary Oracle (6 page)

“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 learned 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.

My second flaw was on the inside of me, visible to no one at first. It was only after I entered my second year of life that outer signs of the flaw began to alert Magda and Jerome to it. Increasingly, the top of my head was warm to the touch and my eyes bugged out of my head and my skin broke into curious sweats. That was when the bird-woman, who had hovered around the three of us since the birth, took me away to live with her. It was she who paid for the doctors who discovered
that my tiny heart was working overtime to compensate for a missing part.

When I was eighteen months old, surgeons stretched my twenty-eight-inch body out on the table and sliced open two vertical and two horizontal inches of my chest in a good approximation of a cross. They reached inside to clip and sew my most important muscle, repairing the flawed circuit.

So my head cooled down. My eyes bugged back into my head. The strange sweats stopped. And that two-inch by two-inch scar on my chest began to grow. With each passing year, it expanded, just like the rest of me. By the time I was nine years old, the horizontal line of the cross had stretched to four and three-sixteenths inches, and the vertical to three and five-eighths. I know, because I measured it regularly with my red plastic ruler. Meanwhile, my bull skull tattoo had grown too. It was one and one-sixteenth inches in diameter, with a left horn three-eighths of an inch long and the right a quarter-inch.

As I know now, both of my flaws—my signatures—were responsible for me leaving Magda and Jerome and moving in permanently with the bird-woman. Just as they had been before I arrived, my birth parents were so poor they could barely take care of themselves properly, let alone a third member of their family. When my heart’s growing malfunction expanded beyond the scope of their financial resources, they turned to the person who had offered to care for me all along, and took her up on her offer. From a tiny, dingy apartment, I moved to a plush, luxurious mansion. From stained, secondhand baby clothes, I changed into vividly colored silks and satins and velvets.

My heart’s flaw was the trick of fate the bird-woman used to claim me. My head’s flaw was the reason she wanted to claim me. It was the bull skull on my forehead—along with similar but less grotesque birthmarks behind my right knee and inside my labia majora—that convinced the bird-woman I was the long-prophesied reincarnation of Mary Magdalen, and future high priestess of her ancient mystery school.

The third shining flaw? I’ll save that story for another time. Suffice to say that it was a secret to everyone, even me, until I reached the age of sexual maturity.

T
he following exercise is designed to upgrade and refine your screaming skills. It is not meant to be a decadent indulgence, but
a means to an end
—a technique for flushing away any resentments, terrors, and rages that might be threatening your ability to feel horny for spiders, museums, lightning, crayons, mountains—and even the Internet itself!

To begin, curl yourself up into a fetal position, make your breathing shallow, and tense all the muscles in your body as tight as they’ll go. Try to include even your obscure, little-used muscles, as well as those you might not even be aware you have. The hundreds of muscles in the face are especially important.

Tense every muscle in your body.

Hold.

Hold.

Keep holding. Keep holding.

And release.

Now even as you withdraw your concentration from this full-bore constriction, try to keep a great deal of residual tension active in the background. Give the command to your subconscious mind to remain on high alert, with maximum stress. Begin to envision what it would be like to tense up your organs themselves.

To assist in this process, you may want to visualize your worst fears.

Imagine a person who hates you, and picture all the terrible qualities this person attributes to you.

Summon the memory of the worst betrayal in your life, the most traumatic violation.

Envision yourself dying alone in a horrible way.

While holding those scenes in the forefront of your awareness, work yourself up into the most galling discomfort you’re capable of.

Tense every muscle in your body, every nerve, every organ. Turn yourself into a taught bundle of astringent fear and hatred.

Hold.

Hold.

Keep holding. Keep holding.

And release.

Now allow yourself to squeal a low whine in the shape of the sound “no.”

Take a breath and again emit a pitiful, desperate moan that circles around the curse “no.”

Draw another breath, and spurt another “no.”

Begin to uncoil yourself from the fetal position, all the while spilling the holy “no” from the abyss inside.

Now stand up.

Straight and tall.

Bend and stretch and reach for the sky.

Stick out your tongue and cross your eyes and put on your ugliest face.

Take five fast breaths and then unfurl a yowling “no” against all of the wounds life has forced you to endure.