The Televisionary Oracle (26 page)

By 3
P.M
. I was on a northbound bus for Marin County. As I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, I pulled one of my new twenty-dollar bills out of the wad and rubbed it on my forehead in a silly act of sympathetic magic.

Somehow I had managed, until that moment, to ward off all thoughts of the grief I might be causing my mothers. I’d been aflame with visions of the scoured new face that awaited me. My imagination had also been toying with fantasies of what I would do if the chiefs of the Pomegranate Grail renounced and banished me. I couldn’t believe they’d resort to that, but if they did, I was prepared to launch my own damn mystery school. It would be anchored in the old teachings but fueled by the epiphanies that awaited me.

Unexpectedly, though, as massive Mt. Tamalpais loomed to my left and sparkling Richardson Bay to my right, Vimala’s devastation was pouring into me without any censorship whatsoever. I was not projecting or imagining what she felt. Her actual emotional state was being reconfigured in me. I’d had this experience before, but never at such a great distance (when had we ever been separated so thoroughly?), and never saturated with such anguish. I didn’t know the thoughts that went with it. Had she already discovered that the Grail was missing? Surely this much pain couldn’t have been stirred simply by my as-yet short-term absence. She couldn’t possibly know yet that this was the beginning of a time of travail for her. Could she?

My master plan was vague on this point. Would I let my mothers
know with a brief phone message that I was all right, even as I continued to hide my whereabouts from them? Or should I make a complete break, maintain utter silence, and require them to wander in limbo, terrified of what had become of me? The former would increase my risk of being found and would make it more difficult to carry out my grand experiment free of their vibes. The latter would be cruel but might be necessary if I hoped to sustain the resolve I’d need to transform myself.

By 5:30 I was checking into the slightly seedy but cheap and serviceable Villa Inn, about three-fourths of a mile from downtown San Rafael. My room had a kitchenette, and there was a coin-operated laundry room on the premises.

I loved the name of the motel. If you shoved together the two words in “Villa Inn,” you got “Villain(n)”—the perfect hiding place for a renegade avatar.

No one in the world had any idea where I was, not even Elsa. I’d told her I was bound for Santa Rosa.

What I was looking for in a plastic surgeon was similar to what I liked in a gynecologist: a frank, earthy, voluble woman. The Yellow Pages were full of female doctors, and I began calling them on my first morning in my new digs. Dr. Lilith Elfland quickly emerged as the clear favorite. Her receptionist said they’d had a cancellation, and I could come in that very afternoon. Besides that, I liked her name. The ancient Hebraic heroine Lilith, much revered in the traditions of the Pomegranate Grail, was Adam’s first wife, and a far feistier companion than Eve, the naive babe who replaced her.

A nurse led me into an examination room and wrote on a clipboard as I answered questions about my medical history and reason for my visit. Wanting to keep things simple, I didn’t mention the heart surgery I’d had as a baby. I had my fake Oklahoma birth certificate in my bag, but she didn’t ask for it.

Five minutes after she left, Dr. Elfland entered.

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, push back your hair,” she greeted me, throwing what I took to be a bemused glance at the spot where my bangs covered up my birthmark.

I was taken aback at her jocularity, and overcompensated by being much too quick to pin back my forehead hair with bobby pins.

“I don’t think I’ve come across that name in thirty-eight years,” she said, leaning against the edge of the metal-framed bed to face me. “Since I was six years old sitting on my mama’s lap.”

She was shorter than me, about five feet, six inches, and thin for a woman her age. Her black frizzy hair bordered on being an afro, and she wore no make-up that I could see—both unusual touches. I liked her immediately. My off-the-cuff telepathic scan registered her as smart and free-thinking yet kind.

“You know, I can’t remember how that story ended,” she continued, pushing beyond the boundaries of light introductory banter. “Her step-mother banished her from the tower, right? And sent her into the wasteland? Then what? The usual fairy tale BS about the handsome young prince saving her?”

“No, actually. More like the other way around. Rapunzel and the prince found each other by accident in the wasteland. Her tears fell on his eyes and cured the blindness he’d suffered when he jumped out of the tower escaping from the witch.”

“Well, that’s good to hear. A happy feminist ending.”

“Yeah, except for the fact that the prince had made Rapunzel pregnant right before they got separated. Twins, it turned out. A boy and a girl. She had to give birth by herself out in the hinterlands, then raise them by herself on roots and berries.”

“Booooo.”

“Well, but there’s this. Once she and the prince made it back to the home of his dad the king, I imagine she had all the childcare help she needed.”

“Hooray.”

Dr. Elfland moved close to me and examined my blotch. I liked the way she smelled. It was a natural, non-perfumy scent. Sweet earth.

“ ‘Dysplastic nevus’ is the name we experts call this phenomenon,” she said. “What do you call it?”

“Splotch. Blotchy splotchy smirch.”

“It’s smooth and flat. That’s good. Not likely melanoma material. Have you noticed any changes in it over the years?”

“No. I mean except that it’s grown bigger with the rest of me. I think it takes up the same fraction of my forehead now as it did when I was young.”

“So what took you so long? Must have been a difficult cross to bear.”

I was shocked and pleased at her forthrightness. Should I respond candidly?

“Never had the money before now,” I stammered. “My aunt and grandma finally decided to take up a family collection for me.”

“Well, here’s my plan, Rapunzel. A four-step process. Possibly five, but I think we can do it in four. First time we get together we excise half the birthmark. Local anesthesia. You’ll be in and out of here in a couple hours. A week later we take the stitches out. Depending on how fast you heal, you come back in four to six weeks and we excise what’s left of the mole. Same routine. Stitches out in a week. Third step is to re-excise the scar left from the first two surgeries. About six weeks later we use a machine to sand down any scar that’s left.”

“It’s all outpatient?”

“Yup.”

“And what does it look like when we’re finished?”

“You’ve got a faint horizontal scar that looks more and more like a worry line as the months go by.”

“How painful is it?”

“Not too. I’ll give you a painkiller afterwards, but you may not even need more than good old Advil.”

“When do we start?”

“Let’s go check with the receptionist to see what’s available. She’ll go over the costs as well.”

As we walked together up to the front desk, she had another surprise for me.

“Now how about this other name of yours? Blavatsky. Is that like Madame Blavatsky, as in the author of
Isis Unveiled
and
The Secret Doctrine?
Blavatsky as in one of the most notorious mystics of the nineteenth century?”

I couldn’t believe she’d heard of the woman who, according to the somewhat suspect tales of my flaky biological father, was my ancestor. A plastic surgeon who was on speaking terms with theosophical literature? Though she’d used the wrong term. Blavatsky was an occultist and magician more than a mystic. She was too strong-willed to be a dissolve-the-ego mystic.

“Madame Helena Blavatsky was my great-great-great grandmother,” I asserted with more certainty than I felt. In fact, my research into the life of my supposed foremother cast doubt on Jerome’s claims. Blavatsky told some people she was unable to bear children, having suffered damage to her womb in a fall from a horse while bareback riding in the circus.

On the other hand, there’s also the story that she had a child with the Hungarian opera singer and member of the radical Carbonari sect Agardi Metrovitch, whom she saved from assassins in a back street in Cairo—or maybe it was Constantinople. Her accounts varied.

I heartily wished it were true, that we were linked by blood. She was an improbably accomplished, colorful, and well-traveled woman. The erudite (if sometimes wacky) tomes she wrote synthesized Qabalah, Vedanta, and Mahayana Buddhism and were among the most influential occult books ever written. More than a few scholars of the Western Hermetic tradition view her as the mother of the occult explosion that began at the end of the nineteenth century.

At different times in her life, she had as spiritual mentors Swami Dayananda, Jamal ad-Din, and Thakar Singh
—the
leading reformers of Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism, respectively. She survived a shipwreck off the Greek coast; dallied with secret agents in Central Asia; studied with voodoo priests in New Orleans; hung out with bandits in Mexico; toured Serbia as a concert pianist; worked as an itinerant spirit medium in her native Russia; set up shop as an importer of ostrich feathers in Paris; established the Theosophical Society in India; and traveled in Tibet at a time when it was virtually impossible for anyone, let alone a white woman, to penetrate that inaccessible place.

And besides all that, she had a wicked sense of humor. No less a judge of poetic justice than William Butler Yeats reported approvingly of her pranksmanship. Like the time she snookered a gullible disciple with a story of how the Earth is actually shaped like a dumbbell, having a twin orb stuck on to it at the North Pole.

She was also famous for her supernatural powers. Legends abound of her precipitating showers of roses out of thin air, clairvoyantly finding lost objects, and causing lamp flames to flare up simply by pointing at them. Yeats reported an eerie encounter with her cuckoo clock while alone in her house. Though it wasn’t ticking and had no weights,
its little bird suddenly emerged and whooped.

“Your feminist pedigree is certainly impeccable, then, isn’t it?” Dr. Elfland said as we waited for the receptionist to get off the phone. “Rapunzel, the only heroine in the history of fairy tales to actually save a handsome prince. And Blavatsky, one of the most powerful, charismatic, and intellectually formidable women of the nineteenth century.”

“Also the most madcap woman, maybe, who ever lived. Did you hear about the time she supposedly made little chunks of ice magically materialize inside the suit of a pedantic sycophant who was boring her to tears?”

“I’d like to have that ability.”

The receptionist set me up with an appointment the following Monday morning at 9. Each surgery would run four hundred dollars, the dermabrasion one hundred fifty dollars.

I felt so excited, so brimming with energy, that I walked half the way back to my motel. En route, I decided to make a brief call to Vimala. Why not? She couldn’t stop me now. I was master of my destiny. Compassion was a luxury I could afford.

I bought a blue popsicle at a convenience store and got some change, then picked out a pay phone at a gas station.

“Hello?” Her voice sounded frail.

“Vimala, it’s me. I’m fine. Don’t worry. I just need some time away.” My voice was shaking.

“We need to work on this together, dear. Where are you?”

“I promise to take extra special care of myself. You know me. Ms. Responsible. I couldn’t do something foolish if I tried.”

“You’re hurting me.”

“I’m sorry, mom. I love you. I will be back, I promise you.”

“When?”

“Not sure yet. I’ll let you know next time I call. Bye.”

That didn’t feel good. I could already feel my resolve to go through with my plan eroding just a little. “Better not call again until after the first time under the knife,” I thought.

For the next few days, I kept a low profile. Didn’t want to make myself too familiar a face around town. Mostly bought to-go food and raw vegetables and ate in my hotel room. Hung out at a used book
store called Mandrake’s. There I ordered a tome I’d long wanted to dive into, Carl Jung’s
Psychology and Alchemy
, and found an unexpected bonus by another Jungian—Marie-Louise von Franz’s
Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology
. On the front of the latter book was a crowned serpent swallowing its own tail.

On Monday, the day of the first surgery, I awoke at dawn awash in a joyously familiar scent: sage, pungent earth, moldering leaves, and burnt bark. As I rose out of the abyss of sleep, I realized that the redolence was wafting through my imagination but had no counterpart in the hotel room around me. Where was it coming from? Tracing back its origins, I remembered that I had just been dreaming of the hollowed-out redwood tree that was my meditation chamber back home. I had brought my seven mothers there to show them my other life apart from them. As they reluctantly sucked from the blue popsicles I had commanded them to eat, they were bewildered and distraught. I was triumphant and angry.

“You have never given me back myself,” I told them. “I have had to take it from you. It has been hard and I am so angry at you it will take many years before I can forgive you completely. But now that I know how to become the queen I want myself to be, I can also be the queen you want me to be. And so I can freely say to you that I am your avatar. I am the reincarnation of Mary Magdalen, returned at the darkest hour to restore the long-lost balance of male and female so that apocalypse may be averted.”

A few hours later I was lying on a table in Dr. Elfland’s office, being prepped by her and the nurse.

“Now I’m finally going to bleed because
I
decided I wanted to bleed,” I jokingly thought to myself as she injected the local anesthetic. “
This
is my real first menstrual period. My self-abduction. From a position of strength, and under my own power.”

Dr. Elfland held my hand for a while. It was so sweet I felt like crying. But I held back.

“You have no idea how new this is going to make you feel,” she said. “It’ll be like getting to reincarnate without having to endure the inconvenience of dying.”