The Televisionary Oracle (42 page)

But as for history: There were never, no way, no more menstruating tricksters. A few phallocratic pranksters here and there, yes—driven by revenge and one-upmanship and the lust to humiliate. Tricks, my ass! Just war by another name.

Until now!

Until Yo Mama Persephone!

Praise goo and take a gulp! The archetypes are finally mutating—and just in time.

All hail the Menstruating Trickster! Nurturer of the Drivetime! Dismantler of the Apocalypse! Psychic Judge of the Invisible Government
of Bloody Disneyland and Sacred Janitor of the United Snakes of Rosicrucian Coca-Cola! She who stands in the doorway between worlds and bellylaughs in both directions at once!

H
unkered down in our home-made shrine beneath the Goodwill trailer, Jumbler and I successfully downed our cruel feast without vomiting: the bitter tentacles of the date palm, the salty sweet, beef jerkyish “candy” called Pulparindo, the sour and worm-like shreds of “tender cactus,” and the mummified corpses of the ancient (and perhaps moldy) Andean tubers.

“And now comes the second ordeal that all must endure if they seek initiation into The Eater of Cruelty,” Jumbler said. “This blasphemous yet sublime outrage will require us to assume the posture of beasts.”

I scrambled to obey. The underside of the trailer was only about three feet above the asphalt. We had to hunch over while in the sitting position but had more room to navigate when we got on all fours. Jumbler and I were now facing each other, almost butting heads.

“Raise your fully-opened left hand to a location above and behind your buttocks. Concentrate all your lust for justice in that hand and prepare to smash it with great force against the target. But wait. Not yet.

“First, meditate for a moment on the terrible responsibility you are asking to take on. In seeking admission to The Eater of Cruelty, you are promising to be cruel to the forces of evil and ignorance without yourself ever actually
feeling
cruel. Bemused compassion
must
be your predominant emotional state as you dispense righteousness. Will you pledge, therefore, to fight to the death any hidden attraction you might
have to the seductive lure of hatred?”

“Me! Me!” I called out. “I pledge to hate hatred.”

“That is why you are being asked to spank yourself now,” Jumbler continued. “Think of it as a pre-emptive strike, an immunization. By punishing yourself in advance for any hatred you may be tempted to entertain, you will steer yourself away from committing that original sin in the first place.

“Now let your left hand charge up with the beautiful cruelty of uproariously unconditional love. And spank yourself—for as long as it takes!”

Ow! The first few slaps hurt. But as I continued the relentless pounding, alternating cheeks, a slight numbness set in. A minute after I’d started, my body even found a perverse pleasure in the cognitive dissonance of being touched so forcefully without experiencing the pain that was implied by the fierce impact. But soon the accumulated shock of the battering began to unsettle me. The burning ache in my butt’s nerve endings expanded into a kind of spiritual distress.

I found myself thinking of an experiment I’d heard about once. The test subjects were rapists. They were locked in a room and forced to watch film footage containing violence towards women. Every time a graphic scene came on, the subjects received an agonizing electrical jolt. In this way, they were deprogrammed of the power and gusto they’d unconsciously learned to associate with rape.

Would a similar approach work with me? I tried to recall times in my life when I had felt raging bolts of hatred. They were pretty few in number, mostly confined to the moments I had directly confronted Vimala with a demand to expunge my birthmark and she had refused. But I had to confess I was capable of another brand of hatred—sustained and calculating. The prize example was the way I had punished my mothers by refusing to menstruate. That was a five-year project in well-crafted resentment.

I conjured up those memories in vivid detail as I spanked myself with redoubled fury. Other scenes drew my attention, too, like the day of my coronation at age six, when I was possessed with the lucid realization that I was my mothers’ puppet. In that moment I had first learned the majesty and potency of unrepentant malice.

“Left hand tired?” Jumbler said after a long time in which only
slaps were heard over the roar of traffic on nearby Third Street. “Switch to the right.”

Truly now it was becoming an ordeal. My leg muscles were shaking from a combination of discomfort and exhaustion. I thought I might collapse, and fought against it. The fact that I had to exert my will to prolong the torment made the torment even worse. I was both victim and torturer.

Now a new inner voice rose up, a dissident. It complained
why should I try to extinguish my hatred?
Hadn’t it served me well? Wasn’t it the dynamic motivating force that led me to discover the secret of self-abduction? I wouldn’t even be having this mysterious encounter with Jumbler if I hadn’t harnessed the fuel of my anger.

Unless. Could it be true what he said? Was it possible to invoke all my fighting powers without actually feeling hatred? Could I take aggressive action against injustice and ignorance if I was filled to the brim with love sweet love? That seemed insanely naive.

“Remember, there is a difference between grateful anger and dehumanizing hatred,” Jumbler shouted above the din of our spanks. Was he reading my mind?

“What … do … you … mean?” I yelled back in rhythm to my smacks.

“Grateful anger is
good
darkness. Dehumanizing hatred is
bad
darkness.”

“More clues, please.”

“Grateful anger flows when you have engaged and studied your shadow. Dehumanizing hatred flows when you have ignored and denied your shadow. One is fertile, the other hysterical.”

A mathematical formula: I liked that. I assumed he meant the shadow that Carl Jung described. The unripe and unillumined corners of the soul.

“Grateful anger is when you feel thankful for the irritating people and sickening situations that have spurred you to clarity and righteous action. Dehumanizing hatred is when you are so in love with your terrible emotion that you forget what needs to be changed and turn yourself into your enemy.”

Now I was really confused. Was my rebellion against my mothers good darkness or bad darkness?

“What about if the grateful anger and dehumanizing hatred are all mixed together?” I said. “What do you do then?”

Jumbler suddenly stopped spanking himself. Still on all fours, he crawled behind me and halted my participation in the ritual too. Instead of letting my hand down, though, he held it up in front of me.

“Winner and new champion of the spanking initiation, Rapunzel Blavatsky,” he announced like a boxing referee. “Congratulations and blessings! No one has ever before asked the bedrock life-and-death question so early in the ordeal.”

He let my hand down and bent over to whisper in my ear.

“The answer to the question, ‘What do you do when the good darkness and bad darkness are all mixed together?’ is this: You go out and launch a full-scale attack on that tricky old bastard God himself. Come with me. You are ready for initiatory ordeal number three.”

Jumbler pulled me out from underneath the trailer. When I was standing, he seized my hand and took off running. My butt was throbbing, but it felt good to move so fast after being scrunched up. In a couple of short blocks we arrived at a large fenced lot. Inside was an electrical power-generating substation spread over maybe three acres, though it didn’t seem to be in use. Among the maze of metal, there wasn’t a buzz or a light or a human presence. I followed him as he climbed over the fence and dropped to the ground inside.

Heavy low clouds scudded along overhead and were about to swallow the gibbous moon rising over a highway overpass a few blocks to the east.

“Gather your ammunition,” Jumbler commanded, picking up a big rock from the sandy ground.

“Take that, you lovable old asshole!” he screamed as he heaved his missile straight up. It fell to earth about ten yards in front of us.

“Aim for heaven, Rapunzel,” he turned to address me. “Make a direct hit and God might be so intimidated, or perhaps impressed is the better word, that he will show you how to disentangle the good darkness from the bad. Then again, he might not. But in any case, it is good to apprise the Supreme Being that we know
it is all His fault
.”

He collected three smaller projectiles and sent them soaring towards the night sky. In its descent, one rock pinged a transformer a short distance from where we were. The other two made audible sounds in the
hard dirt as they nose-dived.

“The good thing about this command post,” Jumbler confided in me as I scooped up two rocks of my own, “is that if the bombs don’t actually crash into God, they will not hurt any innocent bystanders when they plunge back down.”

My first effort was unimpressive, a shallow foray. I never lost sight of the rock’s flight in the night sky. It plinked down meekly about ten yards away. Jumbler pounced on two fist-sized rocks and pitched them up with a relaxed fury. Again, two clanks heralded their arrival somewhere amidst the mass of metal that stretched before us.

I got a running start for my second launch. With a karate yell, I brought my arm down to the ground and then propelled my payload starwards as hard and straight as I could.

This time there was no chink of metal, no thud of ground. How could that be? I was sure I hadn’t arced it so far that it landed out of earshot. My throw was almost perfectly vertical. Indeed, I was afraid it might hit one of us.

“Victory!” Jumbler shouted after another few seconds passed with no audible sign of my rock’s descent. “The heavenly stronghold has been breached. Perhaps God himself has been dinged by the amazon’s bombardment.”

He grabbed both my hands and danced me around in circles.

“Even more important,” he exclaimed, “The Eater of Cruelty is now open for business with its first two recruits. Initiation was wildly successful.”

“But you didn’t make a direct hit on heaven,” I protested fondly. “I did. I passed all three ordeals and you only passed two. Why should you get initiated too?”

“Because I was here to bear witness to your merciful assault, and that is just as crucial as the assault itself.”

“OK,” I allowed, “but only if I get to be the Queen of The Eater of Cruelty and you’re vice-president.”

“I do not want such a lofty position in the organization,” he said. “If it is all right with you, I prefer the title of Head Janitor.”

He shepherded me to the opposite end of the defunct power station. In a couple of minutes we were escaping over the fence. He bid me to follow him to a 7-Eleven that was within sight. Only then did I
realize that we had left the Jung and Artaud books, as well as my empty Clorox bottle, back at the Goodwill trailer with the rest of the shrine.

“Shall we pick up some supplies at the sacred store over there and begin our first performance?” he asked, pointing at the 7-Eleven.

Suddenly I felt an uncontrollable urge. Too giddy to censor myself, I slinked up behind him and began tickling his sides. He squirmed and laughed at first, then launched a counteroffensive. He lifted me up on his back, locked his skinny arms around my legs, and carried me along with difficulty, breathing hard. I held on to his shoulders. We entered the store that way, to the alarm of the Pakistani clerk.

“No dancing in the store,” he called out to us.

“We’re not dancing,” I said recklessly, “we’re praying.” I started murmuring the prayer-like thing Madame Blavatsky had had me chant during our Supersoaker eucharist in the Drivetime earlier that afternoon. “Take and drink of this, for this is the Chalice of My Blood, a living symbol of the new and eternal covenant. It is the mystery of faith, which will be shed for many, that they may attain tantric jubilation and kill the apocalypse.”

This seemed to appease the clerk. It also caught Jumbler’s attention.

“What does this colorful phrase mean—’kill the apocalypse’?” he said as he grabbed a box of envelopes, a package of ruled notebook paper, a bag of rubber bands, and two Bic pens. I leaned my face against the left side of his head. His hair smelled delicious, a kind of musky lavender.

“It comes from one of my other great helpers, Madame Helena P. Blavatsky. I told you about her earlier. She likes to ask me, ‘What are you doing to kill the apocalypse?’ She thinks it’s the most important question in the world.”

“But it cannot be the most important question in the world, because that title belongs to the one you posed before: ‘What do you do when the good darkness and bad darkness are all mixed together?’ ”

“Maybe they’re two different approaches to the same problem?” I said.

He plucked a box of small birthday candles from one shelf and old-fashioned razor blades from another. Soon we were in front of the cracker section. He knelt down and had me dismount from his back. I surprised myself by massaging his shoulders for a few seconds. Were
we that familiar already?