The Televisionary Oracle (37 page)

Jumbler had engaged the clerk in conversation. They continued to
chat long past the time the money was exchanged. He seemed fascinated with the older woman’s stories about her girlhood in El Salvador, the unusual bright green fabric she had bought for five dollars a yard at a garage sale, her granddaughter’s communion, and several other nondescript tales that I tuned out. It all went on so long that I wondered if it weren’t somehow supposed to be part of my “crash course.”

At least this break had given the four Advils time to cure my head pain. But I was anxious to get back to our game.

“In the new Theater of Cruelty,” Jumbler said as we exited the market, “I would like to suggest that one of our basic performance rituals should be to listen with smart sympathy to people whom everyone else considers unimportant.”

So that’s what he’d been doing.

“I like that idea,” I said. “Though I’m not sure what it has to do with cruelty.”

“It is cruelty
par excellence
,” he exclaimed excitedly. “A radical rejection of widely held values. Going vehemently against the grain of all the habitual emotional reactions that fuel the daily grind. What could be more cruel than expressing compassion with concentrated intelligence? It is a living whirlwind that devours the darkness of angry superiority, knee-jerk dehumanization, and unthinking competitiveness.”

“But there must be better ways to cultivate that kind of cruelty without boring yourself to death. I don’t agree with the tired old tradition that being of service to humanity means sacrificing your fun.”

“But I
did
have fun talking to the clerk in the market. Please know that I was not acting in the tradition of the bleeding-heart liberal, whose compassion is condescending and sentimental. I was not merely being nice to appease my own harassing conscience.”

“What possible fun could you have had gabbing about all those inane subjects?”

“First, Rapunzel, I have my bodhisattva vow to guide me:
I will not accept liberation from the wheel of death and rebirth until I have worked to ensure that all sentient beings are also liberated
. So you see it gives me the sweetest pleasure to imagine that I am creeping closer to nirvana by helping the market clerk get there with me.

“And then there is my second vow, my Rosicrucian vow:
I will interpret every event in my life as a direct communication from God to my soul
.

With that as my guide, I find inspiration in the oddest and most unlikely places. As Carl Jung advised, I look for the treasure in the trash. As the alchemists recommended, I find the gold hidden inside the lead.”

“And what great secret from the divine realm came your way courtesy of the boring clerk in the market?”

“Several. I will tell you one. When she described to me her granddaughter’s first holy communion, she looked straight at you and winked and cocked her eyebrow three different times. I am not even sure she realized what she was doing; perhaps God was making His own expressions appear on her face. At that moment I knew without a doubt—perhaps God was also using her to communicate with me telepathically—that you too are in some way making your first holy communion. How I cannot say exactly. In my mind’s eye, the image of the clerk’s granddaughter kneeling at the altar turned into you.”

I immediately flashed on my vision in the Drivetime earlier that day. Madame Blavatsky had initiated a ritual she called “Magdalen’s First Supper.” She’d filled the Supersoaker with the unidentifiable red liquid from the Grail and sprayed it into my mouth while repeating a mutated fragment from the Christian eucharist: “Take and drink of this, for this is the Chalice of Your 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.”

Jumbler had seen true.

We had stopped in front of a pawn shop. It was closed, but the lights in the window revealed a display with Easter themes. One rainbow-colored basket contained fake green confetti grass, jelly beans, a chocolate bunny wrapped in pink and yellow foil, and numerous necklaces with centerpieces of the crucified Christ.

I was aswim with two competing emotional states. On the one hand, I had become as soft and gooey as I ever got. My mothers had often experienced my melted heart, and Rumbler had certainly shared my most tender feelings in the Televisionarium. But I had never even come close to letting my guard down in the company of an actual male—if indeed Jumbler was a male.

On the other hand, my discriminating analytical mind was on full alert. (That this was possible, in light of my squishy state, was both
delightful and unfathomable.) As close as I was beginning to feel to Jumbler, as much as I instinctively wanted to throw great heaps of trust his way, I was acutely aware that I knew almost nothing about him. Maybe there were grains of truth in his beliefs about me. Maybe he really did have some magical link with me that would be thrilling to explore. But my training as the avatar of the Pomegranate Grail demanded that I stay skeptical. Magical thinking serves you well, my mothers had taught me, only if balanced by scientific thinking.

My problem was how could I gather more concrete information about Jumbler without spoiling the mood he had created? I also thought it would be wise if I didn’t let him control or initiate every aspect of our interaction.

“If you know so much about me,” I finally said with as much poise as I could muster, trying to betray neither of my extremes, “why don’t you seem to have any awareness of two of my most important incarnations? The one I had in Palestine almost two thousand years ago and the one I’m in now?”

“I confess that there are great gaps in my understanding of your destiny. I do not like this fact at all. It brings me pain.”

“But how do you know so much about me in the first place?”

“I can give you three reasons.”

“Please do.”

“The first is that I remember my previous incarnations, or at least some of them, and in several of those I have been close to you. The second is that I am a true dreamer. That means that I know how to become awake while I am dreaming, and can discover secrets in my dreams about the waking realm.”

We were standing at a red light waiting to cross the street. Just then three remarkable cars drove by in a mini-parade. They were old-style Mercury Comets, built in the 1960s. One was robin’s-egg blue, one lemon yellow, one emerald green. With my recent meditations on Mercurius and Mercuria still fresh in memory, this vision lifted the levels of synchronicity to boggling heights.

Jumbler seemed to be hesitating or deliberating about the third reason he knew so much about me.

“And the third is,” I jumped in, “you’re good at making up strange stories about me that I have no way of confirming or denying?”

He took my hand, brought it to his mouth, and kissed it.

“No, my dear. The third is hard to explain in the limited vocabulary of the English language. If only you understood ancient Egyptian.…”

The kiss and the reference to me as his dear and the vision of the Mercury cars and his gracious forbearance in the face of my taunt: All had conspired to make my knees feel weak, my solar plexus mushy.

Or, my skeptical mind said, maybe it had more to do with the fact that I had barely eaten all day.

“I am not your holy guardian angel,” he began. “No incarnated human being can be anyone’s holy guardian angel. But your holy guardian angel and I have affinities. We have what you might call conversations. She works harder to serve you than I do because you’re her only job, whereas I have my own destiny to attend to as well as yours. But I am one of your great helpers.”

“Do you know my other helpers?”

“Do you?”

“Earlier today I made the acquaintance of one of them for the first time.”

“May I ask which one?”

“Madame Helena P. Blavatsky. Though I suppose I should mention that she was not exactly clothed in flesh and blood. I encountered her in a place called the Drivetime. Have you heard of it?”

“Of course. The wormhole between the Dreamtime and the Daytime. The songline that connects the two and is a hybrid of the two. But don’t tell me you just discovered this wonder today. Surely you have known about it from an early age.”

“I’ve called it by another name before now.”

“Thank God.”

“And what about Madame Blavatsky. Do you know her?”

“No, I regret to say that I do not. But then, as I said, I only know a part of your destiny’s overall scheme.”

“Do you know the part about how I’m the reincarnation of Mary Magdalen?”

For the first time since we met, Jumbler seemed to have become shy or evasive. He wouldn’t look me in the eyes.

“I am going to take you to the holiest, most beautiful place in all
of Marin County,” he said with a weird fierceness as we passed a Pizza Hut. “It is very close now.”

“I refuse to go to the holiest, most beautiful spot until you say what you have against me being Mary Magdalen.”

“I am sure I will get used to the idea in time.”

“But what’s the problem? Aren’t you happy for me?”

“It is just that if what you say is true, I have been kept in the dark about a very, very large piece of the puzzle.”

“Who’s the mysterious and powerful puzzle-master, anyway? Who’s doling out these pieces so stingily?”

“You know,” he said mournfully, “when you were dying—I mean when you were dying as Artaud—you refused to see me. I even visited the hospital, and you put your palms over your eyes and your fingers in your ears until I went away. But I forgive you. I forgave you then. In the hour when you died, a few days later, I woke up from a nap dreaming that you were wrestling a cloud for the right to block the sun.”

“And why did I refuse to see you?” I asked.

“Because I loved you too much.”

Up until this point, Jumbler had seemed superhuman in his glib mastery of the flow. He had been dashing, confident, relaxed. But now his face looked defeated. I felt sorry for him. My first impulse was to help him get back to the state he had been in.

“What does that mean?” I asked. “ ‘I loved you too much?’ ”

“It means I loved you more than you loved me. And it was not the first time.”

“You had a desperate unrequited crush on me when I was Paracelsus, too?” I said, trying to lighten his mood.

“Do not mock me, my dear.”

“Maybe the problem started with you being my great helper without me being your great helper. That would create an imbalance of power, don’t you think?”

“But I have never had the expectation that you should pay me back. My gifts must have no strings attached. I am a bodhisattva.”

“But why shouldn’t I be in cahoots with your holy guardian angel, as you are with mine? What if I wanted to give to you as much as you gave me? How could I be so narcissistic as to let our relationship be one-sided?”

“It is not right for me to ask for your blessings to rain on me, or even to yearn for you to be in my special service.”

I felt a sudden rage. “Maybe that’s why I was so mad at you,” I cried. “Maybe that’s even why I couldn’t love you as much as you loved me: because you set it up so that I wasn’t allowed to give you as much as you gave me. That was selfish of you, don’t you see? It was cruel. You wanted to be the big giver, bigger than me, and you trapped me in the role of the receiver. You made me into the objectified idol so you could be the holy devotee.”

I couldn’t believe what I was saying. Where were these ideas coming from? It felt like I was picking up a centuries-old conversation with Jumbler. I was trembling with the bizarre familiarity of it all.

We had arrived in the parking lot of Goodwill, a store that sold recycled clothes and furniture and other miscellaneous stuff. Jumbler set his books and bags down near a dirty white trailer that was parked next to the rear wall. It was the back half of a large truck, which presumably housed raw donations before they were processed. At one end it rested on two pairs of tires, and at the other on thick metal stilts.

Jumbler’s eyes were closed as he leaned against the trailer. The rapid twitching of his eyelids indicated that he was following a stream of inner images. I could well appreciate the state he was in and wanted to give it all my respect. When he tottered and started to slide down, I grabbed him as best I could to guide him. He ended up seated with his back against the tires of the trailer. I sat next to him with my hand on his knee. The smell of diesel fuel and motor oil was pervasive at first, but faded as my nostrils got used to it.

We remained almost motionless in that position for a long time, maybe half an hour. Now and then he would twitch or mumble as if he were asleep and dreaming of adventures. I felt, ironically, that I was extemporaneously fixing the age-old imbalance. All my energy was pouring into him unconditionally, all my attention. I had no inclination to tune into my own inner dialogue, but wanted to make myself available to him in whatever way he needed me.

After a long time, he spoke words that were intelligible. “All these centuries, I have been trying to atone.”

“Atone for what?” I asked.

“Atone for my failure to make you my equal in the new religion we
spawned. I did not make it clear enough how crucial you were. I did not work hard enough to wear away the resistance of the male disciples. And so our successors distorted everything we worked together to accomplish.”

I could not for a moment believe that the person sitting next to me, as inscrutably magical as he might be, was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Yet that is exactly what his vision seemed to have told him. I was willing to play along with this fantasy, as I had been responsive to his other improvisations, but I regarded it as inconceivable that he could have been ignorant of this amazing facet of his destiny until now.

“The world was not yet ripe for me,” I said simply. “But it is now.”

Jumbler rose and stretched and gave an exultant sigh.

“Yes,” he agreed. “And that is why I must declare an end to my compulsive atonement. It is time to stop feeling guilty and start letting you help me do what we set out to do so long ago.”