The Televisionary Oracle (8 page)

There’s one other treat left for me to explore from the pocket of the shirt Rapunzel bequeathed me. An envelope with a soft puffy something inside. Opening it, I find a rectangle of cotton inside a cover of waxy sheer violet paper. The corners are rounded, and it measures maybe six inches long and two inches wide. The edges of the object are decorated with glyphs and pictograms, which I recognize from Marija Gimbutas’ research as more of the hoary symbols of the ancient Goddess religion: lozenges, double-headed axes, snakes, and butterflies.

One side of the object has a strip of sticky substance that extends from end to end. The other side is tinctured with what appear to be reddish brown blotches. They feel moist and sticky. I imagine or maybe actually experience a pleasant shock in my fingertips.

I bravely but gingerly bring the object to my nose to sniff. The fragrance is sweet patchouli with a hint of butterscotch and eucalyptus.

Making sure no passers-by are spying on me, I linger in this olfactory investigation. The longer I sniff, the more penetrating the odor. There seems to be no saturation point. Usually, if I sniff a strong smell over and over, its potency gradually fades. But if anything, the aroma emitted from the cotton pad is growing stronger.

Another strange thing: New sub-scents continually rush in. Raw unsweetened chocolate. Fermented apples on the edge between wine and vinegar. Roasting coffee. And then, impossibly, there’s an unmistakable aroma from childhood: my pink night-night, the blanket I carried around with me for most of the fourth year of my life. I’m transported to the heart of a moment in which my four-year-old girlfriend Dulce Weil and I wrapped ourselves up tight in my pink night-night and rolled down a grassy hill covered with clover.

Other smells invade. Baking cinnamon buns. Moist carrots freshly plucked out of rainy dirt. Musky skin of Kerry Kastle, the first girl I ever touched on the inside. The honeysuckle blooming outside the window next to our bed that night.

I feel dizzy but entranced. I love how the scents explode at the root
of my nose and radiate out into my brain and body. My fingertips drink in the redolence; my heart; my lust. It’s almost as if the circulation of blood centered in my heart is running parallel with the circulation of aromas centered in the cotton pad. My dizziness becomes a whirlpool. But I can’t bring myself to pull my nose away from the magical artifact.

I open my eyes, trying to anchor myself. The reddish-brown Rorschach blotches on the pad begin to undulate and weave. I feel my pupils jiggling in my sockets, stimulating further animation.

And then I’m hallucinating deep into the history of the blotches. Their ancient origins. A giant, naked, blue-skinned Goddess with snakelike auburn hair and eight arms erupts out of a salty tidal pool in an autumnal estuary. She seems as inhuman as the wind or the ocean. I fantasize or hallucinate myself lying naked below her on marshy ground under a twilight sky. Her right foot is on my chest and her left on my thighs. She’s over me like a holy mountain. She’s inside me like a slit in my heart. I hear my voice inside me growling, “I
know
you! I
know
you!” As if in response, she breaks off a branch of wormwood from amidst her prodigious hair and shoves it in my mouth. As she squats, her smells fan out. Absinthe, marijuana, ammonia, eucalyptus, seaweed, rose. They’re all over me, saturating me like a soft electrical shock. My eyes fibrillate, seeing her thousands of times per second. Bending her sweaty blue face down, she shoots a steaming river of words into my ear: “I’ll make you famous with no one but me.” Her necklace of severed human heads drapes across my chest, and I’m flooded with still-pulsing blood. She licks my face with her enormous tongue, inundating me with the tastes of the gall bladders and nasturtiums and comets she has devoured. She does not eat my face but rises again like a yew tree growing impossibly fast. Now she’s swarming. Fireflies and maggots glisten in her gnarled hair, and her pendulous blue breasts ooze yellowish milk. One of her eight hands wears a baseball glove filled with a pomegranate and another cradles a toilet plunger topped with a diamond. Still others carry fresh figs, colored Easter eggs, and a silver Grail cup sloshing with reddish-brown liquid. In one of her hands swings my own bleeding, decapitated head. Even though I can plainly see it there, my face frozen with surprise, I still, somehow, have my head on my shoulders too.

I feel like vomiting but can’t because I’m paralyzed. The only part of me that’s able to move is my jade stalk, which is pronged straight up towards her and far bigger than usual. She leaps off me, grabs this handle with a free hand, and pulls me to my feet. My body is stiff and straight, like a hypnotized volunteer in a stage magician’s levitation display. Still clutching, she drags me through a jungle of brown cattails to the inside of a purple canvas dome. She arranges me on the dirt floor, then squats down on me, engorging my sex with hers. Bright-eyed women in plum lingerie are arrayed around us, watching and murmuring prayer songs that sound like running water. I feel vulnerable, fascinated, humiliated, afraid, curious, and totally turned on. Waves of erotic pleasure rip through me, but they’re so unlike anything I’ve felt before that they push me to the verge of panic. It’s like
she
is penetrating
me
. As if she’s ejaculating some ocean of electricity into the end of my lingam and gushing it down into and through my whole body. Time and time again her body is consumed by a rising spiral of shudders, then stiffens and climaxes. Each time she yowls triumphantly, “You’re changing! You’re really changing!”

Only when I feel sure that she has squeezed all the bliss she can from me do I give myself permission to release into an orgasm. But before I can surrender, one of the women from the circle hands her an antlered animal’s skull. Grasping it by the horns, she presses it down against my belly. Miraculously, as if my skin were suddenly porous, the skull penetrates me. I feel my insides gurgling and rearranging to accommodate it. The agony is so novel, so interesting, that I hear myself screaming “Thank you!” as my eyes roll back into indigo sky. The anguish is not an event or a feeling. It’s my whole world. I’m disappearing into the Land of Pain. With each heartbeat, an icy hot burst of shattered diamonds explodes at the base of my spine, shooting out a web of acid rivers which sluice through my legs, to the ends of my fingers, ripping out the tip of my tongue with a memory of the last nanosecond before the Big Bang. It’s like I swallowed a bomb. Vultures and moles and hyenas and praying mantises are cannibalizing me. I’m being spanked with knives from the inside.

I’m aware of a perverse and yet poised longing to keep a record of the pain. I want to preserve every nuance of my relationship with it, as if this were the first flush of falling in love: the moment of imprinting.
But the stress of the revelation is too great. I cover my face with my hands and pass out.

Next thing I know I’m floating down a dark red river on a raft. On one end of the vehicle is a television made of bushes and clay and glass and jewel-like beetles. Standing at the other end is Rapunzel. Wearing a rainbow batik mini-dress and unlaced black army boots, she propels us along with a pole. I’m reminded of Charon, from Greek myth, who guided dead souls across the River Styx. “Did you steal Charon’s job?” I joke weakly to Rapunzel. “The archetypes are mutating, Rockstar,” she replies.

I gaze at the TV. It has no images, but keeps scrolling the same printed message.

R
elax. Breathe sweetly and deeply. As you inhale, become aware that every one of your heart’s beats originates in a gift of love directly from the Goddess Herself. As you exhale, allow every cell in your perfect animal body to purr with luminous gratitude for the enormity of the blessings you endlessly receive. Become aware that any residue of hatred still tainting your libido is draining out of you into the good earth.

Continue to breathe sweetly and deeply. Now gently explode yourself into an even more serene shimmer of reverence. Feel the lustful compassion flowing from your mitochondria in spiral hallelujahs. Sense the flocks of blood-red angels floating across the grey-green pupils of your eyes, dropping bunches of fresh beets to celebrate your homecoming.

You are now more at peace than you have ever been in your life. Your body feels the way it does after you’ve floated for an hour in warm seawater. The calcium in your bones and the iron in your blood are swarming with memories of how they were originally forged at the core of a red giant star that died billions of years ago.

Now imagine that you’re dreaming, but you’re also wide awake. You’re both and neither. It’s not exactly like an out-of-body experience and it’s not exactly like virtual reality, yet it feels like both. You’re in
the Drivetime, the wormhole that connects the Dreamtime and the Waketime. You have become one with the Televisionary Oracle.

I
’m back. It’s me, Rapunzel. The chick with the crazy parents and the heart problem and the blotch on my forehead and the twin brother who died in childbirth. I’m getting geared up to tell you another story about myself.

Dear Goddess, You Wealthy Anarchist Burning Heaven to the Ground:

O Goddess, You Sly Universal Virus with No Fucking Opinion:

Hey Goddess, Who Gives Us So Much Love and Grief Mixed Together That Our Morality is Always on the Verge of Collapsing: