The Televisionary Oracle (30 page)

The stench of the place was, I felt confounded to note, intoxicating. I mean it was terrible—a hot sulfurous melange of burning rot—and yet I couldn’t get enough. When I first arrived, my fascination with the uncanny and overwhelming sensation drove me to inhale deeply again and again.

Out of a grotto in the brick-colored stone wall closest to me, there emerged a stage. Except for the fact that it was a rough-hewn structure whose foundation was composed of sections of tree trunks lashed together, it resembled a fashion-model runway. On either side of it were two totem poles, each constructed entirely of televisions crushed and welded together. Some of the screens, maybe fifteen altogether, were fully functional and showed looping scenes of different disasters. One featured the mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion. On others,
there was an oil spill aflame on a sickly river, long rows of hospital beds with patients whose bodies were rupturing in torrents of blood, a monstrous tsunami inundating a beach town, and a mob of emaciated rioters invading barricaded condominiums to steal food.

My emotional state was a mix of shock and intrigue. This landscape, in its squalid realism, had none of the glamorous dreaminess I was accustomed to in the Televisionarium. In addition, I was not garbed in the luxurious silks and satins that were my usual vestments there. In fact, I was not clothed at all. For a few moments I contemplated the example of the ancient Celts who used to go into battle stark naked in order to intimidate their enemies. But in a place fraught with so much jagged unfamiliarity, I did not feel comfortable doing that. I made my way over to the ferris wheel, and, with a broken-off lawn-mower handle I picked up on the way, plucked a lime green pajama bottom and orange and purple pajama top to cover myself.

Because I could see a person seated on the runway, I decided to head over there. As I pulled myself up onto it, I found an obese older woman seated on a bed that looked exactly like mine back in the motel room where my physical body lay. The same orange pillows were propped up behind her back, and the same orange and green striped bedspread.

The woman wore a homespun loincloth and a shawl, reminiscent of Mahatma Gandhi. On her head was a medieval-style jester’s hat. Fishnet stockings reached to the middle of her corpulent thighs, where they were rolled up. There was a silver ring, some set with gems, on every one of her fingers. On her lap she had a large bowl from which she was eating shrimp, spaghetti, fried eggs, and chocolate.

Nearly surrounding the bed on the floor were colorful papier-mâché masks, mostly red and yellow, that looked like they’d been made by disturbed children. There were demented bunny rabbits, human-frog hybrids, alien babies, retarded bears, even a kind of waterfall face.

I studied the woman more closely. She had mesmerizing grey-blue eyes, crinkled light brown hair, high cheekbones, and a broad face with a wide nose. I recognized her. It was my great-great-great grandmother Madame Blavatsky.

“Well, I’ve been meaning to ask you, Queen Trashdevourer, what in Persephone’s name are you doing to kill the apocalypse?” she said
to me abruptly in a gutteral voice full of phlegm. “How are you annihilating the armageddon that thrives in your and everyone else’s heart?”

“My name’s not Queen Trashdevourer,” I replied.

“No, of course not. It is Rapunzel. Rapunzel Chucklefucker.”

“Rapunzel
Blavatsky
, not Chucklefucker.”

“Exactly. Certainly. Blavatsky. Like mine. But that doesn’t excuse you from answering the question. What the bloody hell are you doing to kill the apocalypse? That is your job, right? The reason you came to Earth this time around? Just look at this place. It is getting messier and stinkier by the hour.”

As she gathered a handful of eggs from her bowl and shoved it into her mouth, she made a sweeping gesture with her arm to call my attention to the scenes around us.

I thought I knew what she was driving at, but I was annoyed that she so presumptuously assumed I would play along with her outrageous use of language. “Kill the apocalypse?” It sounded ironic, mockingly portentous: not exactly a tone I felt comfortable using in regard to a subject as grave as the end of the world.

I heard noises from inside the stony cleft at the end of the runway. A man and woman arguing?

“Sounds too violent for me,” I said to Madame Blavatsky. “I can barely bring myself to kill a fly, let alone an apocalypse.”

“That’s not what I heard,” my great-great-great grandmother said. “My sources call you the Slaughterhouse Savior. Annihilator of Armageddon. The Slayer of the Wreckers. She Who Murders Mass Death.”

These terms offended me. Worse, they made my throat and gut feel as if they’d been grabbed by a powerful hand. Before I was even conscious of being upset, a choking whine flew from my mouth.

It was embarrassing. Why was I overreacting so acutely? Maybe because everything I’d ever been taught about myself had convinced me that I was a peaceful lover of life, a force for healing and redemption in the world. I had never heard words like “murder” and “slaughter” used to describe me. In my vulnerable state they felt like an assault.

“Incinerator of Illusion,” Madame Blavatsky continued in a majestic, mellifluous tone, not acknowledging my breakdown. “Exterminator of Lovelessness. Liquidator of Suffering. Poisoner of Greed.”

Now she was verging on caricature. I wondered if she was making
fun of me, or testing to see how gullible I was. I was caught between an autonomous visceral distress and a humiliating doubt about whether my distress was unwarranted, having possibly been triggered by a sick joke.

I felt I was on the verge of not liking this woman.

“I’m a creator, not a destroyer,” I managed to enunciate as I seethed. “I am spearheading a mystical conspiracy to restore the Goddess to her rightful place as co-ruler of heaven and earth.”

This assertion helped restore my bearings, even though it was humiliating (albeit in a milder way) to be quoting the Pomegranate Grail, an institution from whose authority I was supposedly fleeing.

“But I ask you again,” she insisted. “How exactly is the lovely art project you just described going to assassinate the apocalypse? How will you and your charming Goddess obliterate the beastly endgame that the bloody patriarchs are hocus-pocusing into existence with their relentless curses?”

Beginning again to believe that her obnoxious query was at least sincere, I forgave her a little. But I resented her insinuation that the role I had been prepared for all these years was a wimpy, ineffectual thing. As allergic as I’d been to certain aspects of my upbringing, I was proud of the education I had received.

In response to Madame Blavatsky’s pressure, though, I had to make conscious a doubt that had long plagued me. Vimala and company had never been specific about the strategy by which I would foil the seemingly irrevocable drive of patriarchal culture towards mass annihilation. For a while I’d hoped they were saving juicy revelations about this matter until later. But as the years went by with no clues forthcoming, I increasingly suspected they had no master plan whatsoever. I grew numb and apathetic towards the whole project. It was all too fuzzy and abstract.

The sounds that had been brewing from inside the grotto in the far wall now emerged in the form of two dancers. It looked like Magda and Jerome, my biological mother and father. Neither of them made eye contact as they whirled around me and Madame Blavatsky.

They both wore vulture headdresses, the hooked beak curving down, along with black body suits that had an image of a skeleton on the
front and back. Over this foundation, Magda was wearing a red satin merrywidow. Jerome had on a beige leather breechcloth.

Jingle bell bracelets, which they sported around their ankles and wrists, provided a cheery cadence. Their dancing was spritely and more athletic than I thought the real Magda and Jerome would be capable of. Or were these the real Magda and Jerome—I mean the Dreamtime version of the real ones, their astral bodies? I was used to thinking that my experiences in the Televisionarium were objectively true, not merely products of my imagination. But I wasn’t sure I was in the Televisionarium right then.

From time to time, the dancers who resembled Magda and Jerome joined arms, took swigs from metal flasks, then spit triumphantly in each other’s faces.

All the while they sang:

“Magda?” I called out at one point. She ignored me. I had to resist running over to hug her.

“Jerome?” He gave no sign that he’d heard me.

After a few minutes, the two dancers waltzed back into the grotto.

“I am waiting for some sign of intelligent life, Empress Cowdung,” Madame Blavatsky said impatiently once they’d disappeared. “How. To. Put. The. Apocalypse. Out. Of. Its. Misery. Will you be getting a job as some Nelson Mandela-meets-Mahatma Gandhi politician who machiavelliates all the nuclear weapon arsenals into oblivion? Will you be building high-tech medical research labs to serve as our frontline of defense against nasty new successors to the Ebola virus and AIDS?”

She paused dramatically and turned to gaze at the TV screen where bodies were exploding in bloody gushes on hospital beds.

“Or perhaps you would prefer to buy and operate a chain of newspapers,” she continued, “that awakens your celebrity gossip-drunk readers to the tragic fact that animal and plant species are getting snuffed out at a rapid rate unseen since the mass die-off sixty-five million years ago?”

“Well, I need to do some more meditation on this,” I offered finally, trying to recover my composure. About fifty yards away, a massive piece of sculpted junk, a windmill made mostly of skis and crutches, chose this moment to collapse. As I strained my eyes to watch, I saw that some of its fragments fell upon a nearby pile of burning books. I wondered if I should go after the dancers who looked like Magda and Jerome.

“What are you waiting for, Queenie? Meditate the hell out of yourself right now. I’ve got time.”

“It’s been my impression,” I began, “that the kinds of solutions you’re talking about merely attack the symptoms of the blight. I’m all for people taking political action, but I myself have a different job.”

“And tell me again what magnificent task that might be?”

“My role is to heal the sickness at the source—in the collective unconscious of humanity—through my teachings in the material world and my benevolent hexes on the astral plane.”

“Oh, but that doesn’t sound very crunchy, does it?” Madame Blavatsky chided. “It may be true in a wishy-washy way, but it is simply not crunchy. Nor very itchy, either. I think you will have to do better than that, Snow White. The patriarchs’ apocalypse is a very hardy beast, and very dumb. It will not crumble in the face of just any old wishful thinking. We need something itchy crunchy, my dear. Something squawky twisty and punchy wacky.”

“I’ll just have to say,” I muttered, exasperated at her persistence, “that at the present moment, to the best of my knowledge, I’m not doing anything to kill the apocalypse. Would you care to make a suggestion?”

“Ah! Excellent move! Most bumptious! I love to see receptivity in a sixty-six-million-year-old avatar. Fabulous omen! Lucky day!”

“Sixty-six million years old? You flatter me, grandma.”

“Sixty-six million, twenty-two thousand, one hundred fourteen years, three hundred and eleven days old, to be exact.”

“Now who’s talking in a way that’s not very itchy crunchy?”

“You got rid of one experiment gone bad, the dinosaurs. Pretty practical practice for the patriarchy, I’d say.”

“You’re making me feel crazy.”

“Good. Good. It’s about time. Those mothers of yours, Goddess bless them, neglected some crucial elements of your education. Madness, for instance. No way you will be able to massacre the genociders of the imagination without a healthy capacity for divine dementia.”

I wrinkled my face up in a comically monstrous mask and flailed my elbows like a chicken attempting to fly as I sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in the cracking voice of a wicked old witch. Then I squatted down to do a Russian Cossack dance as I alternately barked like a dog and shouted out, “I am a cabbage head! You are a cabbage head! He, she, and it are cabbage heads!” My sense of humor was returning.

“That is witty but not quite wise,” Madame Blavatsky said coolly after my outburst ran its course. “The divine dementia I am talking about may sometimes require the enchanting idiocy you just exhibited, but more often it is inconspicuous to the naked eye.”

“Give me a lesson,” I dared.

“I already am, most certainly am right now.”

“What we’re doing now? This is what you call divine dementia?”

“That is correct, my dear. Otherwise known as living in the Drivetime. The realm that is neither the Dreamtime nor the Waketime, but both at the same time. You could say it is the wormhole between the two worlds. The tunnel of love. An excellent location for killing the apocalypse, by the way. Of course it would help if we could get a few million more wizardly people on the planet to master the skill of inhabiting this sly power spot. No question we could electrocute Armageddon in that case.”

I immediately liked this notion of the Drivetime. Maybe that’s where I was, I thought, and not in my good old Televisionarium. The landscape and garb were different, and so was my state of mind. I wasn’t as far gone from my normal waking consciousness. I felt the same delightfully alien dreaminess as usual, but I was more grounded. The analytical lucidity of waking awareness was burning hotter in me, but without any loss of my imagination’s fluidic potency. I was indeed in
full possession of the powers of both Dreamtime and Waketime.

“So if you know so much about me,” I said, “tell me more about myself. Am I, was I, really Mary Magdalen? Who is Rumbler? Is he real, or some split-off part of my own brain? How can my mothers be so smart and so stupid at the same time? If I’m sixty-six million years old, why I can’t remember any details about my storied past?”