Nine Kinds of Naked (8 page)

Bridget, not knowing when, where, or who she was, glimpsed the underside of the pew one moment and the tornadic tunnel
of light the next. Death murmured in her mind, trading echoes with birth, and all physical sensation was overwhelmed by the fundamental vibration of being, shining like the sun and chiming like a chorus of nightingales as her self-perception became nothing more than a kaleidoscopically unfurling column of love.

The immensity of the next surge returned Bridget to the biophysical realm. The unbounded brightness that had constituted her awareness solidified into a subterranean lullaby, Mother Earth humming with the unfathomable resonance of woodwinds and whalesongs. As another surge overtook her, Bridget heard herself growl, then howl, and her entire body rocked in abandon. Still believing his wife to be in agony, the oblivious Dave Wildhack tried desperately to soothe her, but he would have had better luck trying to calm the tornado. When Bridget opened her eyes, they were as wild as a jaguar's, and when her eyes locked with his and she gasped in sweaty laughter the way she always did during their lovemaking, it became suddenly clear to Dave what was occurring. He experienced a momentary spasm of panic at her lack of decorum, but this indignation was difficult to sustain given the fact that he was a porcupine in a church full of naked people in a tornado, one of whom was his laboring wife. Who among us can judge an orgasm under such circumstances?

The oblivious Dave Wildhack looked down and saw the crown of his child's head. Bridget threw her own head back and gripped Dave's hand with such ferocity that he feared she might break it. He heard a preternatural moan emanating from Bridget, increasing in volume as she surrendered into the
primal pulsing panting throb of her peak climactic. She relaxed her grip on Dave's hand as her entire body relaxed into the force of nature it had become, and Bridget let out a caterwauling cry of such ardor that Dave was alarmed to find himself with an erection. He had heard of couvade, sympathetic pregnancy, but what was happening here? Despite everything, he watched with waning distress and waxing elation as the child's crown emerged by perceptible millimeters with every contraction, and glimpsed for a split moment the primordial revelation Bridget was experiencing: Creation is love, and love finds its greatest expression in the act of Creation itself. Creation is ecstatic, and the Big Bang is a beatific, radiant requiem of rapture that yodels the illusion of all-that-is only so that it may rediscover itself and continue to love. Creation is sexual, uninhibited, immodest, and imprudent. Creation so enjoys itself that it's no wonder at all that the universe is infinite, and there is nothing else to do anywhere ever but perpetuate the pleasures of eternity.

 

27
R
EMEMBER
Dr. Rip Blossom, the striptease-fiend gynecologist? Well, he was still in medical school at the time of the tornado, but if we were to speak with him ten years and several hundred births later, he would opine as an ob-gyn that an orgasmic birth is a ridiculous notion. Birth is painful, period, and women have science to thank for the epidural.

Once, Dr. Rip Blossom debated with a local midwife who tried to argue that all births should be orgasmic. According to her, pain functions as a cease-and-flee command from the
brain, as when you touch a flame. Clearly, there is no logic in ceasing or fleeing the birthing process, and besides,
all
reproductive functions give pleasure. Sex, childbirth, and breast-feeding all flood the brain with oxytocin, and more fundamentally, childbirth is a uterine contraction and an orgasm is a uterine contraction. Whether it's perceived as pleasure or pain has everything to do with context. In a culture that cannot fathom orgasm as anything more than a pornographic genital spasm, the sensations of birth are so unprecedented and overwhelming that they elicit fear, are resisted, and are thereby experienced as pain. Tradition, too, creates an expectation of pain, and the iatrogenic hospital setting of bright lights; legs spread in cold steel stirrups; and frantic, impersonal, imperious strangers in masks only contributes to a perception of the situation as more like clinical rape than a celebration of new life. Absent conditions in which institutional efficiency takes precedence over the unpredictable rhythms of maternity, the midwife said, and absent a culture that instructs its members that being alive and the processes of life are something to be embarrassed about, and it becomes understandable how the agony could become the ecstasy.

Dr. Rip Blossom scoffed off in a huff, and later had her arrested for practicing medicine without a license.

 

28
S
IXTY-FOUR PERCENT
of humans grow their hair in a clockwise whorl from the crown of their head. Thus, it was not improbable that the emerging crown of Bridget's daughter revealed a clockwise whorl of matted hair. When the oblivious
Dave Wildhack observed this, however, he immediately looked up and confirmed that the tornado was spinning clockwise away. To him, it seemed a staggering coincidence.

Dave, drunk off of Bridget's energy and hence the only prairie dog brave enough to peek above the pews, watched in fearless awe as the tornado abruptly veered toward the interstate, tripping over the west wall and kicking most of it over. When this commotion was complete, Dave looked down and saw that the child's head was now completely free and her immense elfin eyes were gazing up at him. Taking care to protect both mother and child from any lingering projectiles, Dave gingerly tucked a finger under her emerging armpit and slithered her loose. Bridget's body went limp with release and she burst out laughing. Dave, still unsettled by the orgasmic birth, did his best to disregard this. He lifted his daughter and smiled a momentous grin, to which she responded by delicately hacking a tiny lungful of amniotic fluid in his face.

 

29
T
HE HAIL
that had heralded the tornado was lavish, and the ensuing windstorm made sure that a fair proportion of the windows in town met a hailstone fate. When the tornado finally departed, the air at ground level found itself considerably cooled, so much so that a mist was rising from the two-inch-deep cover of hail as water vapor condensed from the local atmosphere. Gradually but unhesitatingly, the hail fog tiptoed its way into every alley and blown-apart building, taking great care not to startle anyone further, until it had covered the town with its fantasian ambience.

The hail fog gently softened the whimpers and sobs of the
huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and a certain naked congregation was grateful for the relative privacy the mist afforded. The sky, minutes earlier a churning hell of blackened clouds bristling with lightning, now shone with the cerulean exuberance of early spring.

Minutes passed, and the traumatized people of Normal began to stir, calling out names and responding to each other's cries. Those who were relatively uninjured or unstupefied stepped into temporary leadership positions and set about organizing rescue and first aid activities. Soon, the decapitated anthill that was Normal, Illinois, began to pull itself together, figuring out who was hurt, who was missing, the sorts of things one never thinks about until suddenly faced with disaster.

After a while, as the sun comforted the land laid raw by the tornado, the mist began to fade. At first it revealed incomprehensible destruction: scores of trees stripped of all bark, road signs axed into their naked trunks, three-foot-deep trenches gouged into the earth, entire slabs of pavement missing from roads and sidewalks, demolished building after demolished building, and a Dalmatian barking frantically, high in the boughs of one of the oldest sycamores in town. But as the hail fog continued to dissipate, it gave way to something else, something so entirely enchanting that it compelled a pause from every dazed and haggard task at hand. So dazzled were the bruised and beaten that they lost all sense of the devastation in which they were immersed. So wonderstruck were they that the world basked in an adoration of itself for perhaps the first time since infancy. A conspiracy of sunshine and hail fog had created rainbows, hundreds of rainbows everywhere
at once, shimmering through the swirling mist like the shadows of seraphim. No devastation was unaccompanied by a rainbow, no pile of rubble was without its prismatic halo. It was brief—a mere thirty seconds, a crack in the wall, a tear in the veil. And then the sun evaporated the mist past a critical point, the air cleared, and the tossed and the trampled people of Normal, Illinois, were free to look upon one another and their world with eyes wide open.

 

 

 

 

The First Knot: A Gentle Breeze

 

“I
AM NOT
the bottom sentence!” Clovis yelled from some faraway dream, carrying the bellow into his waking world with all the imperiousness of a king's proclamation. Clovis had awakened himself before the second syllable of “bottom,” and heard himself holler “sentence!” as he was stumbling upright out of the bed of acorns within which he'd been nestled. Unnerved by the bossy nonsense of his own decree, he was rattled all the more when he found himself clutching a fistful of dry, dead leaf crumble, a handful that only the previous night had been his carefully collected and ecstatic bouquet of bejeweled oak leaves.

Attila had been drinking from a spring-fed pool when her master awoke, and though she could decipher no familiar command from his abrupt barking, she reasoned by his authoritarian tone that there was a task to be done without delay. Obediently, she crunched through the acorns toward Clovis, encouraged by his happy yapping.

Clovis was tremendously relieved to see Attila nearby, for in his waking startle he had momentarily feared her missing. But now all was well again, and he bid enthusiastic glad mornings her way. Sure, they were hopelessly lost in a mighty forest, and the only trail to this point had been a parade of beautiful leaves that had mysteriously disintegrated overnight, but something was bound to present itself. That Attila had found a spring was certainly a soothing circumstance.

Clovis returned to the spring with Attila, drank as much as he could, and filled all their water sacks. Then he sat quietly, trying to sense from which direction the sun was rising above the canopy, trying to perceive a decline that might eventually give way to a streambed, any bearing at all. There was nothing, at least at first. But the longer he sat listening to the whistles and the rustles of forest din, the more he became convinced that he could make out a barely audible voice, female, he thought, and singing?

Attila could hear the voice, too. In fact, she'd been hearing it all morning, and as she watched her master shush her shuffle and cup his ears, she understood that he was striving to hear what was perfectly apparent to her. At one point she brayed helpfully, but that only inspired more frantic shushing. Attila
watched in silence for several minutes before beginning, with neither premeditation nor spite, to lead the way.

At first, Clovis tried to stop Attila, but he quickly remembered that she somehow always knew where she was going. He halted her just long enough to mount, and they were off, the slush of Attila's legs through the acorns making it impossible for Clovis to hear anything else.

So, Clovis was immensely pleased when he began to hear strains of song occasionally rending through the trees, even above the racket of Attila's step. Before long, it filled the air around him, music of such poignant exaltation that his heart blossomed even as it burned. He spied a clearing ahead and brought Attila to a halt, fearing to interrupt such impassioned heartsong. Dismounting, he found the layers of acorns to be thinner here, a deferent shock wave to the clearing. He crept ahead, keeping a large tree at the edge of the clearing in front of him. Once he had reached and hidden himself behind the tree, he cautiously peered around it, fully expecting the sunshine herself to be singing naked in a shower of god-begotten rainbows.

But even this magniloquence could not have prepared Clovis for the onslaught of love that greeted his eyes so wide. There, deep in the center of the clearing, was a monumental king oak, towering against an abundance of open sky, stretching its limbs to the highest heavens in forms known only to those who know what it is to dance with abandon. But this is not even what Clovis saw. The vision that became Clovis for a split second before cleaving into past and future was a thrusting bucking writhe of nymphomania. But mind ye puritans,
this was no pornographic grab-and-grope Wesson-oil free-for-all. This was Dionysia, of the deity, sacred lust, a perfectly contoured and immeasurably rhythmic orgy of dryads, a soaring aura of sexuality and song. And then it was gone, vanishing like lightning, but not without breezing a kiss against the face of its inadvertent voyeur. Clovis was left agape, and he would remain so for some time thereafter, leaning against the tree behind which he'd hidden, gazing at the tremendous trunk of the king oak, mesmerized by the memory of the moment.

Indeed, he may well have stayed that way for the rest of his life if a nimble little gnome no taller than his thighs and sporting a red toadstool cap hadn't tugged on Clovis's pants leg and, grinning like a psychotic ringmaster, warned, “Be thee ware, weary wanderer, and touch not the bough of mistletoe,” just before popping a mushroom into his mouth, touching the side of his nose, and somersaulting away.