Santa Claus Conquers the Homophobes (32 page)

“We have a crisis,” came the Son’s assured voice.

“We do. And I—”

“Have done with apology. Michael meant well, though he made the egg-seed reversible. Interesting, that. You and Wendy did the proper and generous thing, a grand gesture blocked by the Tooth Fairy’s desire for revenge. Your failure to observe the progress of seed and sprout was entirely innocent. No blame. If I wanted to blame anyone, there would be plenty of mortals upon which to cast it.”

Santa nodded. “I have seen into their hearts. So many buried children beneath the greed and envy and self-righteousness. We thought to tweak one small area of prejudice, yet it sobered me—beyond what I revealed to Wendy—to witness close-up such a dark inheritance of folly and ignorance.”

The Son’s gentle grasp enclosed Santa’s hands. Those pure eyes gazed into his, glistening with tears and love. Santa grew aware that the Son, though to all appearances muscled and solid, was, so near the anniversary of his crucifixion, flush with liquidity.

“You bleed,” said Santa, observing his palms, the spear wound at his ribs, blood streaking his feet.

“I do. The passion leaps in me. Tears flow easily. On Easter Day, they turn to tears of joy. But this year, they shall not do so, unless we can devise a plan.”

A plan? Santa stood helpless. “If I revisit them,” he said, “and turn the egg-seed, they will die.”

“Yes.”

“It’s too late.”

“It is.”

“Why?” asked Santa. “Why must there be such wickedness in them? And so much of it in your name?”

“Invented deities always excuse cruelty. I descended. My message was clear. But the bickering and misinterpretations began before I left. To this day, they continue and intensify. Splinter factions, many of them, have gone astray. They roundly condemn the speck of sawdust in their brother’s eye and miss the forest in their own. I love them all, even so.” Those eyes opened Santa to the soul, all of his secrets exposed and caressed and cared for, even the Pan part that so shamed him. Before him stood complete acceptance in the form of a man. And Santa could peer deep into this man’s heart, intimate now with his infinite love. “Saint Nicholas, kind heart, I love you.”

“As I, dear Lord, love you.” He thrilled to say it, frenzies of joy pinwheeling inside him. He felt like a naked babe caressed by an adoring mother and swaddled in woolen warmth.

They gazed into one another’s eyes and wept.

Still, no plan came.

But Santa soon became aware of a sound, deafening in its clamor yet whispered and faint. He knew, though he could not tell how, that it was the sound of Christ’s flesh wailing, in all its suffering, back to its origins, back to the Divine Mother. Though she was nowhere to be seen, Santa felt her presence deep inside her child’s loving gaze. Come inside me, he heard, but the Savior’s lips had not moved.

“Yes,” said Santa, falling into those inviting eyes.

Then they were standing before her, a majestic woman seated, in robes of sheer evanescence, the transparent raiment that covered and discovered all of creation, every curve perfection, the nipples of her breasts moist with milk, that same milk that had nurtured the Christ child centuries before in Bethlehem.

* * *

As the Son interceded with his mother for the sake of mortal men and women, her eyes moved from him to Santa and back again. Though she knew all, though from her womb all creation had sprung and back into her womb would all creation, at the end of time, return, she listened with perfect patience.

“My child,” she said when he had finished, “this short span of days celebrates humankind’s redemption. Through your triumph over death, hope is ever reborn in the hearts of the living. But more than mere hope. An assurance that, as surely as spring revives the dormant earth, spreading wildfires of vitality across the globe, so too can the embers of compassion and fellow feeling be sparked into life in humankind, even when those embers seem cold and lifeless.”

Though the naked perfection of the Divine Mother’s body graced the eyes, her robes, opaque yet transparent, were the blue of carnations, her hood falling in folds along her temples. How grand, thought the Son, her having come to earth to conceive him and give him birth, to sustain him with her milk in babyhood, to nurture him as he grew. She had grounded him. By her presence and example had she taught him the wisdom of the flesh and the righteousness of rejecting every authority but the still small voice within.

“Such,” she said, “is Easter. And so shall it continue. What Adrasteia intends as a day of slaughter and hatred shall be transformed into a new birth of compassion.”

The Son’s heart leaped in him.

Beside him, Santa’s spirits were similarly revived.

“You would ask how,” she continued. “It is ever so with wonder. After exuberant joy comes the question. But before I demonstrate how, we lack two of our number. Wendy, of course. And another recruit who, though quite busy at the moment, is critical to our success.”

The Son followed her gaze earthward, her eyebeams carving out a vast inviting highway that stretched down into a certain burrow where immortal hens incessantly lay their eggs and ever-lubricated machines hum, buzz, and clatter in celebration of her child’s triumph over death.

Chapter 32. Two Immortals Grandly Tasked

THE ROUTE THE EASTER BUNNY WAS preparing to travel flared vividly in his mind, right down to his precise manner of entry and exit, the precise number of bunny heartbeats allotted to each house
in toto
and in each house-quadrant traversed, and the precise gestures of paw and whisker. For he was nothing if not a perfectionist, an over-planner, a rehearser-into-the-ground of his Easter Eve scenario. This was, for him, not a simple matter of travel and delivery; it was a work of art, a living sculpture, a dance. Every prior trip—all of them stored in instantly recallable detail in his memory banks—had had its thematic shape, informed by geography, economic status, age, or by the degree of wisdom or creativity attached to each recipient. This year’s trip he had decided would be alphabetical, by last name, then first and middle, breaking ties with pet names and hair color, and he had just launched into the P’s on his seventh mental run-through.

In the midst of envisioning the living room of Pankin, Alexis George, he had been abruptly sucked upward, passing through the earth and sky into the stratosphere and beyond, stunned in wonderment and a little bit panicked at the steady grip of...what? Then up into the Empyrean he rose, shooting past the Father and an archangel bowed low before him. Hadn’t the Father visited his burrow a few years earlier? Of course. To praise his work, as he recalled, though there had been another reason that, for the life of him, he could not recall.

No wait, hadn’t Santa said something about something being taken from him? As he flew, he glanced between his legs. Can’t quite grasp to what he had been referring. The memory’s going, it appears, as concerns visits. Ah well, no matter.

Abruptly the Father was left behind and there before him loomed an amazing sight indeed: the Divine Mother and next to her the Son, Santa, and little Wendy. He dropped into place beside them, the force that propelled him making graceful his landing.

Some sort of shame began to rise in him. Odd, very odd. But at the Divine Mother’s gesture, it fell away.

“Everyone’s here,” she said with a lilt. “Good.”

“I’m not sure I can...with all due respect...there’s so much preparation yet to be...my God, you’re so amazingly...beautiful!” He was babbling and his heart went pitty-pitty-thump, astounded as he was to be here, yet anxious about his looming task.

“Be calm, bunny,” she said, and at once he was.

“We have a crisis,” confided Santa, to which Wendy nodded.

“Crisis? Dear me. But what’s that got to do—?”

“Simply everything.” The Divine Mother was smiling. She wasn’t saying that he had
caused
a crisis, not at all, but that by him might it be attacked and resolved, by him might the crisis be...well, de-crisised.

“In the course of your deliveries tomorrow night,” she said, “I ask that you adhere precisely to Santa’s itinerary last Christmas. He and Wendy will accompany you. Inside many millions of fallen mortals, Santa placed a wondrous engine, a prejudice-remover, to restore them to reason and godliness in the matter of sexual orientation. Alas, the creature known as the Tooth Fairy perverted their magnanimous gesture into unreason and devilishness. But your special delivery will trump her efforts.”

“My special...but aren’t we talking about a whole heap of houses here? In addition to my regular stops?” The jitters seized him anew. Yet he also felt a burgeoning excitement. And a hope that this would, what, somehow
redeem
him, though for what he needed redemption he could not say.

She nodded. “You can do it. As Santa and Wendy discovered, magic time is sufficiently expandable to accommodate vast amounts of travel in one night; not easily, mind, but with no wasted effort, no lingering, and with the purest motives driving you.”

“This special delivery. Of what does it consist?”

Her face beamed compassion. “As light floods through a pane of glass but breaks it not, so my Son, whom you see here, flooded through me, flesh of my flesh yet not born in the ways of men. With this milk, which each year at this season so freely weeps from these nipples for all humankind, I fed and nourished him. Observe this flesh and this milk, so easily transmuted in a good cause.”

The Easter Bunny’s eyes widened. For he gazed into her womb and witnessed, miracle of miracles, the plucking and week-long fermentation of cocoa beans, browned and dried in the sun, roasted to separate the shells from the nibs, which nibs were milled, pressed, and pulverized, the whole conched for many days, turned and turned again with the sweet additive of the Divine Mother’s milk, then poured into a mold, cooled, and extracted, until there before them, in the tenth part of a breath, the Divine Mother held, balanced upon her fingertips, a three-foot-tall milk chocolate egg, suggestions of lace drapings at its top and bottom.

“For each mortal incubating an egg-seed shall I produce one of these, fashioned to his or her culture’s taste in chocolate and to his or her precise spiritual needs, to halt and reverse the damage done by the Tooth Fairy. These I shall convey into the Universal Womb from which all new-created things come.” So saying, she slipped the egg into a vertical opening beside her, which reminded the Easter Bunny in shape, color, and texture of an immense sun-dried tomato. “And out of your knapsack”—a thing of silk and velvet materialized on the Easter Bunny’s back, its strap slung bandoleer-style across his chest—“shall it emerge when you summon it.”

Which he now did, gesturing behind his shoulder where the divine pouch had grown heavy. The egg she had produced leaped parenthetically betwixt his paws, its aroma rich with generosity, chocolate, and the milk of human kindness. He savored its divine bouquet. Never had he tasted—for his nostrils were as sensitive as a mortal’s tongue—such chocolate, more medicine than confection.

“You are to set the egg beside each sleeper, then proceed to the next.”

Wendy tugged Santa’s sleeve and whispered in his ear.

“If I may,” said he, “what of the Tooth Fairy? What’s to stop her from destroying them before they can work their wonder?”

The Easter Bunny’s ears drooped. “There you go,” he lamented. “She’ll find out. She’ll pulverize them. Sleepers will wake bereft, our prodigious night of deliveries all for naught.”

“Fear not,” said the Divine Mother. “Adrasteia and her brood will be repelled by these eggs, unable to remove or adulterate them, unable to approach them at all, so overpowering is the aura of heavenly goodness that surrounds them. But I have presumed too much.”

The egg vanished from his paws and at once he grieved its loss.

“What is your reply?” she asked. “Will you do it? Will you accept my charge?”

The Easter Bunny began to sweat. Everyone was staring at him. The Son, Wendy, Santa, the Divine Mother. Indeed, the Father himself must right now be turning his way, as also that groveling archangel and everybody in heaven. It was up to him. But agreeing to this would upset his plans, his perfectly devised alphabetical scheme of delivery. To say nothing of the sheer magnitude of the task. Somehow he would have to coordinate his Easter basket delivery with the delivery of these divine eggs. The complexity staggered him. How could both tasks possibly be accomplished without flaw? He would miss someone. He was bound to disappoint. These eggs were clearly more important than the baskets, yet both were critical. He would be exhausted, particularly near the end. Exhaustion led to mistakes, to houses overlooked. And what if he delivered the wrong...but no, the eggs would pop out one at a time, their perfect match to each visitant’s need a thing the Divine Mother would see to. He was the bird whose wing brushes one grain of dirt from a great mountain, coming back again and again for eons until the mountain flattens to a plain—and all of it had to be achieved in one night.

“I have made you capable,” she said, a voice of reassurance amidst his internal blather and negativity.

And again he grew calm, resolute, and quite insane. He had to be insane to...to throw all planning to the wind, trusting instinct to weave his meticulous way through a long and complex maze of visits.

“I’ll do it,” he said. “And I’ll succeed, not missing one house, one sleeper, one precious egg delivery, nor any of my scheduled basket deliveries either.”

“Thank you,” said the Divine Mother. Wendy clapped her hands, Santa beamed, and the Son nodded. “Bless you.” And he felt blessed by all creation, having arrived at a critical choice point and chosen correctly.

“If I may be permitted,” said the Easter Bunny, trilling with joy irrepressible. Without waiting for permission, he leaped and chittered and raced all about heaven, circling again and again to the delighted foursome, pounding past clouds and angels and God on his throne, laying claim to all he surveyed and knowing that his task was the most important task he would ever perform and that he would triumph in the end, saving humankind from disaster, exhausted perhaps and lying spent and panting on his burrow floor, but elated in that exhaustion, memories of an extraordinary night burned forever into his brain.