The Televisionary Oracle (43 page)

He handed me the goods he’d gathered so that he could collect an armful of Cracker Jack boxes. I followed him up to the front, where he tried to pay with a fifty-dollar bill. The clerk frowned and refused to take the money. Jumbler returned the bill to his wallet, which I saw now was well-stocked, and produced two twenties, which were accepted. I noticed the clock. It was already 9:30. Close to my bedtime. I’d been up since 6:30.

In a minute, we were outside the store spreading out our haul.

“So what
are
you doing to kill the apocalypse, anyway?” Jumbler asked. He was using a razor blade to slice an inconspicuous slit in one side of the top of each of the Cracker Jack boxes.

“Today? Today I am killing the apocalypse by setting aside everything I believe in and forgetting all about myself so I can listen hard to you.”

“And what about that head wound of yours? Does that have anything to do with killing the apocalypse?” He nodded in the direction of my forehead.

I instinctively turned towards the plate-glass front of the store, which we were squatting beside. Checking my reflection, I saw that a tiny corner of white gauze was jutting out from beneath my beret. Given all the running and jumping I had done, I wasn’t surprised. I tucked the bandage back in.

“It’s a long story,” I answered. “And as I said, I’d rather hear your story right now. Later I’ll tell you all the gory details if you want.”

He had taken five fifty-dollar bills out of his wallet and folded them neatly in quarters. Now he was slipping one apiece into the Cracker Jack boxes he’d cut open.

“I will tell you one good strategy I have to kill the apocalypse,” he said. “It is called mirroring. Do you know what that is?”

“Hmmm. Giving people images of themselves?”

“It would be better to say giving people
true
images of themselves.”

“Yeah, I suppose most everyone is blasted nonstop with distorted and degrading images of themselves. Guess you couldn’t call that mirroring. Funhouse mirroring might be a more accurate term.”

“Exactly right. And I would say that is the prime reason why humanity finds itself on the verge of self-annihilation.”

“Not enough mirroring, too much funhouse mirroring, is the cause of the apocalypse? How do you figure?”

“In Tibet, there are children who are identified at an early age as
tulkus
, reincarnated holy men and women. They are taken to monasteries and raised there by Buddhist monks or nuns who are absolutely certain of their divine nature. Day after day, year after year, these special children are told they are wise and compassionate beings who deserve to be showered constantly with devoted outpourings of love. And showered they are. Would you like to make a guess what proportion of these children grow up to be exactly what they are expected to be?”

“I imagine it’s very high.”

“Ninety-nine percent.”

“But is that
true
mirroring or
inflated
mirroring?” I couldn’t help but wonder what the implications of his argument might be for my own life. Hadn’t my upbringing been similar to the tulkus?

Jumbler was on the verge of slipping fifty-dollar bills into eight more Cracker Jack boxes.

“Here is my point, my dear,” he replied. “All children are born wise and compassionate beings who deserve to be showered constantly with devoted outpourings of love. Every single one of them would grow up to be a tulku if he were treated like a tulku.”

“So true mirroring means never reflecting back a person’s shadowy sides? Never criticizing or correcting? That doesn’t sound right.”

“Of course not. Take you, for instance. I have always loved you, and I will always love you. But if you agreed to allow me to mirror you, I would let you know, with all my most tender compassion, which of your unconscious habits might be preventing your full bloom.”

I will always remember the next moment as a landmark because it was the first time in my life I had a visceral understanding of the word
swoon
. It was like in one of my dreams where I fall off a cliff and halfway through my plunge I figure out I can fly. It also felt as if the whole inside of my body suddenly billowed. In my mind’s eye I saw a time-lapse film of the roots of an oak tree drinking in a downpour after a long drought.

When I opened my eyes again, Jumbler was writing on a piece of
notebook paper. He didn’t seem to mind that I hadn’t responded to his mirroring. In a couple of minutes, he handed me the page.

“What do you think?” he asked. “If you like it, help me handwrite a few more copies. Or feel free to edit or expand it. I would like to make thirteen altogether.”

The note read as follows:

We worked in silence for a while until we had stuffed thirteen envelopes with a love note and a birthday candle. With rubber bands we attached each of these to a Cracker Jack box that was stuffed with a carefully folded fifty-dollar bill. A quick calculation put Jumbler’s investment here at six hundred fifty dollars, plus the cost of materials.

As I stuffed the bundles into our plastic bags, he walked over to a skinny tree on the sidewalk and fiddled with the lock of a bike chained there. Returning with it, he said, “Here is our transportation.”

It was a bulky one-speed bike with thick, well-worn tires. This was the vehicle of choice for a person with a wallet crammed with high-denomination bills?

“You ride on the handlebars,” he said. “I will steer and peddle.”

“Where are we headed exactly?” I asked.

“To your place, I hope. I would very much like to set up The Eater of Cruelty command post tonight. On the way there, we can drop off these offerings.”

“Head north on Lincoln Street,” I said. “It’s about three-quarters of a mile from downtown.”

I thought of what I’d told Vimala when I called her a few days ago. Don’t worry about me, I said. I’ve always been Ms. Responsible. Couldn’t do anything foolish if I tried.

And yet here I was on the night of my surgery, staying up past my bedtime and doing things that if not illegal certainly had the potential to draw the suspicious attention of law enforcement officers. Worse, I was bringing a stranger back to my motel room with me. A magical stranger, true, whose imagination thrilled me. But still.

High on the list of reasons to trust him was the fact that he hadn’t leaked a single dribble of gross male carnality. Scoring with babes did not seem to be a shtick he’d studied. Not that I’d had a lot of previous exposure to that phenomenon, but more than enough to recognize its simple universal signs.

The truth seemed to be that I had to worry more about my own cravings. As far as I could tell, his passion for me was a platonic simmer. I, on the other hand, was a recent convert to the cult of swoon.

My imagination flickered with a scene of us doing a swimming dance together in the pool back at my motel.

Wait a minute. Was the pool heated? I didn’t know. I’d never been in. If not, a night in mid-April would be unluxuriously chilly. Suspend that fantasy for now.

This dose of reality reminded me of a blunt fact that my conscious mind always had trouble acknowledging: I’d never had an erotic encounter with an actual male before. My extensive sensual play with Rumbler in the Televisionarium had filled me with rich memories of eros, however. Besides that, my sex education had been thorough and uncensored. I’d come of age armed with confidence about the subject.

But did I really want to have sex with Jumbler, as in sexual intercourse? I didn’t know. First of all, I wasn’t even sure I was attracted to him physically. With its weird blend of elegance and trickiness, his face wasn’t aligned with the kinds of male beauty I’d identified as my type. And his body had a delicacy which, though not unattractive, wasn’t a quality that had ever pricked my libido before.

Secondly, what I was sure I
did
want were silky, evanescent sensations like those Rumbler and I aroused in each other in the Televisionarium: the beyond-the-body rapture that came from flying together after leaping off the tops of magic trees or staring into each other’s
eyes until we disappeared into the taste of grapes and the sound of cellos and the smell of the ocean at dawn and the sight of the moon rising over a green hill in springtime.

As I contemplated these matters, a crushing collapse was dangerously near. For the first time it occurred to me that maybe the feelings I enjoyed with Rumbler were not possible to experience with an actual male.

By now Jumbler and I had traveled a rickety few blocks on his bomb of a bike. It was a miracle we hadn’t crashed yet. I sat precariously on the handlebars, my hands grasping cold metal on either side of my butt. Facing out with legs dangling, I had to avoid contact with the front tire. Meanwhile, Jumbler struggled to pedal, largely blinded by my body. Two plastic bags full of stuff were wrapped around his wrists and hanging down heavily. Several times I shouted out a warning when it appeared he hadn’t seen an obstacle we were about to crash into.

He took us back to our shrine beneath the Goodwill trailer, where we retrieved the books by Jung and Artaud, as well as my Clorox bottle. Here, too, we left the first of our Cracker Jack boxes and love notes.

“Anonymous gifts are much better than the other kind,” Jumbler remarked as we remounted the bike and headed out.

“When the recipient doesn’t know who the gift came from, she has no psychological debt to repay,” I agreed.

“Even more importantly, the giver cannot use the gift to enhance his social status or inflate his ego. He is helpless to lord his generosity over everyone.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed that people who’re skilled at convincing you they’re magnanimous are often masters of manipulation, too.”

“Do you know what the German word ‘Gift’ means in English?”

“No.”

“Poison.”

“The story of my life!” I laughed. Then in a sudden burst of vengeful glee, I shouted out, “Mommies, Mommies, wherever you are tonight,
danke
for the
Gift
!”

“I want to hear more about where that comes from,” Jumbler noted as he brought our vehicle to a stop.

“I plan on making a full confession in the near future.”

“In the meantime, I have distilled my second answer to your question,
how to kill the apocalypse.”

“Which is?”

“Give anonymous gifts that no one can thank you for.”

“I can see how that might be a recipe for a less crass culture, but I’m not sure I understand how it kills the apocalypse.”

“Think of how much evil in the world is perpetrated by people who purport to be doing good. Think of all the murderous gifts history has been plagued by.”

Jumbler’s comment propelled me into a meditation I preferred to avoid. As an example of evil disguised as good, I couldn’t help but think of the mangled religion the early fathers of the Christian church had fabricated out of the work Jesus and I had done. But I was shy about mentioning Jesus to Jumbler. I didn’t want to get into a discussion about the implications of his apparent claim, earlier, that he himself had been Jesus in a previous incarnation.

“But the murderous gifts would be just as lethal if they were anonymous, wouldn’t they?” I said instead.

“No, because the most destructive gifts are always those which are covertly meant to demonstrate the greatness of their givers.”

A steady drizzle had begun, which would be unusual for April in Santa Cruz, though I thought maybe it was more common here in Marin. We had arrived on the sidewalk in front of a house. Jumbler skulked up to the porch and deposited a Cracker Jack box and love note in the mailbox, then hightailed it back to me.

“Quick, we must escape before our beneficiary spots us,” he stage-whispered. We reassembled ourselves on the bike and barreled away to the next stop, a few doors down, where he performed a similar operation.

For the next half-mile or so, we delivered our boons as the rain fell harder and we got wetter. Jumbler chose the first four mailboxes, but then invited me to choose. This effectively exploded my unlikely hypothesis that maybe we would stop exclusively at homes where Jumbler had friends who were in on an elaborate joke being played on me.

We were almost to my motel and still had four undelivered packages. Our route along Lincoln Street had passed a lot of apartment buildings whose mailboxes weren’t accessible. At this point I demanded
that Jumbler switch places with me. Guiding the bike for the first time, I detoured down Brookdale Avenue, a short street parallel to Lincoln. It was packed with single-family homes.

As I unloaded the second-to-last package on a large porch, I noticed a face gazing out at me from a window in the front door. I scampered away down the stairs just as the door flung open. Having seen the danger, Jumbler motioned for me to abandon the bike and race away on foot.

As we ran, I heard what sounded like a baseball bat pounding on the wooden floor of the porch. “Next time I’ll get my shotgun,” a woman’s voice yelled after us.

“Another good reason for keeping your gifts anonymous,” Jumbler giggled when we’d made it back to Lincoln Street. “Some people hate you for giving them things.”

“You just going to leave your bike behind?” I asked.

“An honorable sacrifice,” he replied. “The first official loss of The Eater of Cruelty. May there be many such worthy losses in the future, all as easy to bear as that one.”

As we pulled into the parking lot of my home, the Villa Inn, Jumbler and I were drenched. I remembered we still had one Cracker Jack box and love note undelivered.

“Uh-oh,” I said, taking from Jumbler the bag that contained the last treat. “I hope we won’t incur any nasty karma. Isn’t it a sin when those with a lot to give don’t get around to dispensing all their gifts? I think there are a couple stories in
Grimms’ Fairy Tales
about poor souls like that.”