The Televisionary Oracle (4 page)

As I meditate on these glories, another item of clothing sails over the top of the stall and alights on my shoulder.

“Sorry to say I don’t have a cardboard Burger King crown with
me,” Rapunzel says. “Would you accept these instead?”

I drink in the lovely sight of the dark plum-colored, silk bikini underpants. They sport the picture of a regal buzzard much like the one that graces the shirt pocket. The only difference is that this one has long, Rapunzel-like hair.

I pull the panties over my head, dipping them down to nose-level before raising them back up and arranging them like a crown. Immediately I’m spinning in a hurricane of synesthesia. A collage of half-remembered, half-imagined tastes and visions from my childhood billows out of a mutating whirl of aromas. I’m slurping raspberry sorbet in a rowboat with my mother as we float on Otsego Lake in northern Michigan shortly after catching my first fish, a scared rainbow trout flipping around and pooping in a red bucket next to me. Or I’m lolling in a plastic swimming pool beneath a tree full of ripe pears in Marty Maxwell’s backyard while eating his mother’s delectable peanut butter and banana and maple syrup sandwiches as his younger sister Debbie lowers her bathing suit and shows us what girls look like down there. Or I’m lying at night in my bed dreaming of listening to the static-y radio broadcast of the Detroit Tiger baseball game when a ball of mist puffs in through my open window, smelling of lavender and vinegar and new-mown grass.

Fermenting dreamily in this ripe vortex, I’m startled when Rapunzel bolts out of the stall and slips by me. “Catch you later,” she says and glides out the lavatory door.

“Can I call you?” I yell after her, but the door smacks shut. I do a series of five tantric breaths of fire to refocus my awareness, fasten a couple buttons on my new shirt, and burst out of the bathroom myself. Rapunzel, wearing my favorite Indonesian-print shirt, is already trotting out the front door of the club. I lope after her, but by the time I reach the street, she’s disappeared. Gambling that she’s turned down Cathcart Street, I bolt that way. But when I arrive at the corner she’s nowhere in sight.

C
ongratulations, beauty and truth fans, for the courage you’ve shown by throwing yourself into our sacred chaos. The celebration you’ve joined is scheduled to last for twenty-two years, or until you undo the black magic you’ve practiced against yourself—whichever comes first.

Whether you’ve chosen to approach your ecstatic falling apart through dream incubation, accessing your inner child’s pet dragon, or talking about your problems until you’ve talked them to death, we’re sure you’ll find your time here at the Televisionary Oracle to be the most rewarding vacation you’ve ever had.

We trust that you’ve all done the recommended preparations before launching into your initiation. For best results, you should be in the third day of your fast. You should have used a chainsaw to destroy any belonging that has made you feel you’re better than other people. And you should have done a meditation to implant simulated memories of great happiness right around your second birthday, the moment our research has determined is the critical turning point in developing trust forever.

Later, after the opening festivities, you’ll be invited to find a comfortable place in your personal dream incubation temple. There a vision will come to you during sleep, perhaps in the form of a visit by a god or goddess, perhaps in the form of a dream of some deed or mission which you must accomplish in order for your healing to take place. Whatever divine prod you receive, we urge you to translate it expeditiously into some action that will change your waking life forever.

One thing before we start. As the Televisionary Oracle begins to pour into you, fight it off—just a little. Flex your willpower to see if you can resist its delicious onslaught. Not to the point of keeping it out, of course, but enough so that you feel confidence in your ability to take only what you need from us. Why? Because as much as we believe you will benefit from becoming one with our lyrical and restorative propaganda, it’s just not healthy for you to surrender blindly to
anyone’s
infomania.

Now we’re ready to go to work on the solution to your spiritual emergency. To begin, release yourself into the emotions of the following affirmation:

O
nce upon a time, right at the beginning of the end of that tragic success known as the phallocracy, that sad miracle, a girl child named Rapunzel Blavatsky—whom I also call me myself and I—was born to quirky parents in a place which many have come to call “Goddess’ Country”: Santa Cruz, California. The child’s mother, Magda Zembrowski, was a dollmaker who had taken up her art as a form of permanent mourning about her four abortions. The abortions had all been invoked in the name of poverty, not fear of children. Magda had in fact long yearned to nurture a helpless little being fresh from the spirit world, and each time the abortionist’s vacuum had sucked the budding clump of cells out of her womb, she’d suffered a Hiroshima.

“Not enough money” had always been the mantra. Magda, though her hands and wit sporadically conspired to create masterpieces in clay and feathers and wood and found objects, depended on dumpster-diving and house-cleaning jobs to stay alive. Her partner, Jerome Blavatsky, had always been too … well … 
insane
to support a child, let alone Magda or himself. When Jerome wasn’t reading books about occultism or writing fairy tales or playing “chaotic piano,” he enjoyed slipping into marathon trances (sometimes lasting as long as three days) during which he would experience himself—he wouldn’t say
imagine
himself, he would definitely say
experience
himself—living, in exquisite detail, in any one of seventeen “other incarnations” he believed himself to be connected to via “astral tunnels.” In one life he was a follower of and helper to Joan of Arc. In another incarnation he was a follower of and helper to the early American religious dissident Anne
Hutchinson. In yet another life he was James, the younger brother of Jesus Christ, enmeshed in a mix of awe and jealousy and the desire to serve Jesus’ mission. All of his trips and sojourns in these other worlds were faithfully reported to Magda, or in his journals, with lush detail and an encyclopedic knowledge of local conditions that seemed impossible to accrue merely from reading history books.

His journeys might have had a greater measure of credibility, however, if among them there had never been lifetimes spent in lands that existed only in fairy tales. Living in Florence as a sixteenth-century painter was one thing. Living the life of Jack in a cottage next to a giant beanstalk that reached to the clouds was another.

A year before the first abortion, when both were twenty-five years old, Jerome and Magda were married by a Universal Life Church minister on the bumper cars at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. And though they’d stayed married and loyally monogamous, they lived apart more often than they lived together for the next six years. This was due not so much to bouts of mutual irritation, which their equally dreamy natures rarely indulged in, as to the fact that Jerome had a deep and abiding need to sleep in caves on beds of leaves (and not simply as a way to save money), whereas Magda found it hard to spend a night without a roof and a few thick layers of foam padding that she’d once pulled from a dumpster behind a warehouse on Coral Street.

Maybe it was this curious non-domestic arrangement that fueled the mystically romantic approach they took towards each other. There was not enough familiarity to breed contempt. For many years, even after their girl child was born, Jerome and Magda kept a notebook in an old leather bag stored high in the crook of a climbable oak tree in the backyard of a mutual friend. The notebook was a kind of diary for their relationship. In it they wrote each other poetry, scrawled dreams and fantasies, made up stories about each other and spoke the unspeakable thoughts that were too private to communicate in person.

It was this perverse insistence on staying in love, as opposed to accumulating furniture together, that provides a clue about how they could have been so careless as to have conceived a fetus they didn’t intend to keep on four occasions. Romance had precedence over pragmatism.

Jerome had a notion based on an ancient Greek word
idoni
. He’d learned this term, he said, during his lifetime as a student of Pythagoras,
which was not a
past
incarnation, mind you, but an incarnation that was simultaneous with all his other incarnations, including this one in twentieth-century Santa Cruz. (I once consulted a scholar of ancient Greek to find out if such a word as “idoni” exists, and she told me that “i” never ends ancient Greek words.)

But Jerome nonetheless believed that
idoni
was a term describing a magically potent electromagnetic substance that’s exchanged between lingam and yoni during sexual intercourse. Most people waste it, he thought. They don’t sublimate it and direct it to any worthwhile task, like, say, saving the world or healing their own pain (as Magda and Jerome did, in the grand tantric tradition). Most lovers didn’t appreciate the occult power of the idoni, but let it stop cold in the neurons that register pleasure. For Jerome, that idoni was rocket fuel for the psyche. It was, he believed, what allowed him to squeeze through the worm-holes that led to all his other lifetimes, and what allowed him to make extended stays there. A three-hour erotic dance with Magda might translate into a three-day vacation with Jesus in ancient Palestine.

Here’s the kicker: Jerome believed there was just one form of birth control that didn’t do terrible damage to the exchange of idoni: the heroic withholding of the semen. He had cultivated a talent for controlling his ejaculatory muscles, and wielded it like a master. While he knew that wasn’t a foolproof hedge against pregnancy, he didn’t acknowledge until the third conception that he and Magda were too fertile a combination to allow even a few spermatozoa from his pre-seminal fluid to leak out.

The very worst violation of the idoni, Jerome thought, was the condom. Rubber was a fascistic insulator, a crime against idoni. Birth control pills were catastrophic in a different way. They inhibited the flow of Magda’s copulins, a key ingredient in the generation of the idoni (not to mention the source of her yoni’s sex scent). The diaphragm and IUD: dissonance, disruption, interference. Abortion, in the prodigal mind of Jerome, was the only acceptable way to stave off children.

Only trouble was that it was a rather expensive form of birth control for poor folks like Magda and Jerome. Perhaps they would have rethought their position if the initial abortion hadn’t been given to them at a steep discount by Dr. Ooster, a Dutch-American doctor who felt an odd sympathy for the two lovable weirdos. The first easy surgery
invited the second and third and fourth, all courtesy of Dr. Discount. Without naming the womb-scraping as a ritual, Magda and Jerome turned it into a kind of sacrificial act to propitiate their love.

A complication: For a long time Magda was unaware that there was, for Jerome, another reason for the abortions. Though his obsessive fantasy life—or certifiable schizophrenia, whatever you want to call it—meant that he wasn’t much good at hiding anything from Magda, he somehow managed to conceal this one secret. He believed that in his incarnation as Jesus’ brother, James, Jesus had communicated to him a mystical truth about how to preserve his ability to live in seventeen lifetimes at once. “You must become your own child,” Jesus told him. “You must not let your reproductive power be diverted into the creation of offspring.
Reproduce yourself
. With the first cry of your first child, the astral paths would close with a violent gulp and you would be trapped in just one body.” Those were, Jerome believed, Jesus’ exact words.