The Televisionary Oracle (44 page)

“But I am bestowing this final treasure on you, my dear,” he said. “What good is it to shower the whole world with our blessings if we do not grant the same favor to each other?” His teeth were chattering. The rain wasn’t cold, but now that it had saturated us, we were.

We climbed the stairs to my room.

“But it’s not an anonymous present,” I protested. “Now I owe you one. You’re probably already plotting how to use my debt against me.”

It was a joke, but it reflected a secret truth. I felt that from the moment we’d met at the bookstore he’d done most of the giving and I most of the taking. And then there was that weird exchange on the way to the Goodwill trailer, when I found myself bawling him out for
having tried to outgive me in every one of our lifetimes together—as if I implicitly believed all his stories about those lifetimes. At that moment, I truly felt that we were recapitulating an argument we had carried on for centuries.

“Then you will just have to present me with a gift of equal value as soon as possible,” he said.

I put the key in the lock of room number 65, ushered us in, and flipped on the light switch. As always, the smell of this place was unexpected and inscrutable. It was partly stale cigarette smoke not-quite-overwhelmed by pine disinfectant. But there was also an entire musty-fresh kaleidoscope: lemon and mildew, perfume of violets mingling with formaldehyde, potpourris that were old when Joan of Arc lived. It made me think of the funeral of my mom Burgundy’s grandmother in Detroit: shriveled-up ninety-eight-year-old crone packed amidst virgin white satin and lusty roses.

“Would you like some dry clothes?” I asked him as I turned up the thermostat. “You’re free to select anything from my designer wardrobe in the closet. I’m going to take a bath.” Since we were the same height, I was sure my stuff would fit him.

I grabbed my black velvet tights and long black velvet tunic and took them with me into the bathroom for after the bath. As I disappeared, Jumbler was examining the altar I had created on top of the television. Among other things, it included a wishbone, a postcard of a Miro painting, an Amnesty International sticker, pumpkin seeds, a prayer flag, a silver and black Persephone statue, an origami of a hummingbird, walnuts, my ceremonial wand and dagger, and a large rock on which I’d written a prayer in miniature calligraphy.

I felt a surge of pride that Jumbler would see this oasis of holy beauty I had managed to carve out of an otherwise ugly room. That was his specialty, right?

I wanted to come up with a return gift for him as soon as possible. Something from the altar? The prayer rock, perhaps? But as I waited for the bathtub to fill, I got a better idea. In the bathroom, hanging on the wall next to the sink, was an odd little artifact provided by the motel management. About four by twelve inches, it was a piece of material that blended the feel of paper and cloth. “Shoe Shiner” it read in blue print at the top, followed by these claims:

Along the sides it said, “Compliments of the Management” and “Begin Your Day Bright and Shining.”

It was a good gift—ordinary yet weird, versatile and anomalous—but I wanted to make it even better. I fetched a pen out of the drawer next to the bed and added to the list of what this magic item could do.

As I finished the alterations, I felt a twinge of pain, accompanied by a pinch of responsibility. It was time to attend to my head wound. I took four more Advils from my stash on the sink and assembled the supplies Dr. Elfland had given me.

In my small bathroom, there were two mirrors: a wide one over the sink and a skinny, floor-length one on the opposite wall. Since my arrival in San Rafael four days ago, I’d reserved all my self-observations for the latter. If I stood up straight in front of it, the top of its reflecting surface stopped at my eyebrows. In other words, it cut off the part of my body where the stain was.

Now, though, I felt compassion for the cursed blotch. It was in its death throes, after all. I could afford to be an indulgent caretaker. I stared into the mirror over the sink, removed my beret, and peeled away the bandage. Uhhhhgggg-ly. Swollen, red, stitched, Frankensteinian. I used cotton balls to gingerly apply some medicinal cleanser. It hurt, though not as much as I expected.

Then I got the bright idea to leave it naked and exposed. It would benefit from not being covered up with gauze for a while, I reasoned. Let it air out. Besides that, I had an urge to see how Jumbler would react to it. With all the apparently idealized notions he had of me, maybe he needed a dose of funky reality. I think a cowardly part of me was hoping to scare him off, too. That way I wouldn’t have to worry
about whether I should act on my erotic curiosity.

My bath was brief and efficient. I didn’t want to risk amping up my sensuality any higher than it already was. When I emerged, fully dressed except for socks, I found him sitting at the round table in the kitchenette. He was making a sign on the back of the motel placemat he’d taken off the desk next to the TV. It looked like it would soon read “The Eater of Cruelty Command Center.”

His waterlogged white clothes were in a pile in the corner. He had donned my only pair of pajamas, which were black flannel, and my only luxurious piece of clothing, an indigo cashmere robe. Without the frame of his boxy unisex white costume, he looked more feline, almost feminine.

Outside, the rain had become a soft roar. I was glad it had waited for us to finish most of our playtime before kicking in. It joined with the hovering steam from the bath to create an almost homey feeling.

“Here’s my equal and opposite gift,” I said matter-of-factly as I set the “Shoe Shiner” down in front of him. He looked at it, gazed up at me briefly, then returned his view to the gift.

“This is a masterpiece,” he exclaimed with a quiet joviality. “Better yet, a spontaneously conceived masterpiece. Living proof that you are vivaciously attuned to the specific truth of the
eternal
now. Truly, no one deserves to be Queen of The Eater of Cruelty more than you.”

He rose from his chair to face me and pressed his hands together in the gesture of prayer.

“And now,” he said softly, “I request permission to kiss your crucifixion.”

I nodded. He gently clasped my cheeks with his hands, then brought his lips to my forehead, kissing it five times: over my wound, under, to both sides, and then directly upon it. With the last, I erupted in sobs. To be able to share my age-old secret in the midst of its mutation, and to have it greeted with such intelligent tenderness, broke me open. Tears cascaded from my eyes and nose. A strange nectar welled up inside my mouth. My heart became a fountain, and the hot sweetness it gushed forth shot through the rest of my body in a branching slow-motion throb. In my mind’s eye I saw an aerial view of a skyscraper imploding, its rock-hard skeleton and facade crumbling into billions of granules.

All my thoughts absconded, leaving my body free to act from its
native wisdom. I leaned myself urgently into Jumbler, then pulled his face to mine and began to drink his mouth. My tongue undulated along the inside of his lips. I soaked in his surprising taste, a delicate honeysuckle. Streams of my tears flowed down into the mix, exciting me to spill even more.

As he responded to my swarming incursion, our bodies converged, our chests and bellies pressing together. Only then did I comprehend that I was embracing a woman. Her breasts billowed firmly against mine through the velvet and cashmere and flannel that separated them. But the extravagant dissonance did not short-circuit my passion; it only unleashed me further. Now, on top of my weeping, a wave of mournful hilarity struck, a rueful bliss that tempted me to howl or sing or make us collapse together on the floor. I resisted all of these. Through my blubbering laughter, I managed to carry on with the leisurely evolution of our grandiose kiss.

“I can guess why you are crying,” Jumbler murmured in a quavering voice as we began to wheel lazily around the room in a demented foxtrot, “but what is so funny?”

“I just discovered a new way to kill the apocalypse,” I said as I caressed her cheek with mine.

“Kiss all the bad guys the way you are kissing me?” she whispered as her open eyes brimmed.

“That’s an idea. But I was actually referring to the fact that I somehow managed to turn a woman into a man for several hours.”

“You did?” she said. She began to sniffle.

“Until a few minutes ago, I must confess,” I babbled as my tears crescendoed again, “I was under a mistaken impression concerning your gender. But don’t worry. It doesn’t change my feelings about you in the least. In fact, I think it makes me feel even crazier.”

Soon we were both embroiled in deep wailing sobs, our chests and throats heaving. I could not believe the volume of water that poured from us, or the soft violence of our convulsions. And yet we were both driven to keep kissing through the rising tumult.

The happy grief that had motivated my initial outbreak was expanding and mutating. No longer was I crying merely because I’d exposed my lonely secret to a smart playmate who had given me tenderness in return, nor because I’d had to make a sudden and shocking realignment
of my perceptions about my playmate’s gender. Those tear-jerking themes had become contagious, lighting up other sore points and hot spots within me. Now I was weeping in amazed excitement that this was the first person outside the Pomegranate Grail who had ever been completely real to me. I was weeping with gratitude that I was finally capable of becoming infatuated with an actual flesh-and-blood human. I was weeping in triumph as I ruminated on the increasingly stunning evidence that I’d done the right thing by running away.

And these were just a few of the epiphanies that were rushing forth, demanding to be wept for. I was spooked and curious at how wild my body felt. I was sad and thrilled at how rapidly I was changing. I melted with anguish and fear as I registered how severe a break I was making from my mothers and the Pomegranate Grail. My liaison with Jumbler was a dramatic upping of the ante in this divorce, not only because my mothers had decreed that I was not to seek any erotic connection before I was eighteen, but also because the lover I had chosen was an infidel, an outsider.

I cried, too, because I was feeling again, only more intensely, the poignant paradox Madame Blavatsky had taught me to feel a few hours ago in the Drivetime: gratitude for the inspirational violations my mothers had inflicted on me, for the ways they had forced me to find out my true destiny.

And why was Jumbler crying? I pledged to ask her when the time was right. For now, I could only guess. If she truly believed that in all our lifetimes together she had always loved me more than I loved her, then perhaps she was shaken to her root by how profoundly she had been able to touch me now, and how passionately I threw myself at her mercy. And perhaps she was crying because for the first few hours of our meeting, I didn’t see her clearly enough to know that she was a woman.

Now and then, at the height of a fresh surge of lamentation, droplets actually launched themselves from our eyes, splashing down through the air into the confluence of moist flesh where we suckled each other. More often, a pearly flow trickled down our cheeks. However the elixir arrived, we welcomed it as a key ingredient in our kiss.

“In the fairy tale of Rapunzel,” I whispered, “her tears have the power to cure the blindness of the prince. Do you have any blind spots
that you would like me to cry on?”

We were still whirling dreamily around the room. During one sweep past the front wall, I had flicked the light switch off. Now, as we glided into the kitchenette, I doused the other. The space was lit only by the dim green glow of my alarm clock.

“I am so very close to healing an ancient split in my psyche,” she said.

“Between?”

“Between being holy and having fun. For many lifetimes, I have tried to get them to originate from the same impulse. And now at last they are on the verge.”

“So where should I anoint you with my tears?”

“Your tears need to reach the crucible inside me where I am trying to get my trickiness and my morality to mingle. It is a spot halfway between my heart and my navel.”

“Then you must imbibe.”

She licked the moisture from both my cheeks, then brought her lips just under the tear ducts of first my right and then my left eye, from which a seemingly inexhaustible supply streamed.

“Give me your potion, artful one,” she sighed as she delicately supped. “Impregnate me with the secret of how to heal others with my pleasure.”

I kept my eyes closed as she proceeded, working to visualize what it might mean for her to accomplish the synthesis she’d alluded to. Examples from the preceding hours immediately revealed themselves. The masterful way she had listened to the clerk at the Mexican food market, for instance. In one coordinated act, she had performed a kind service for the older woman and also used the occasion to do a magic trick which, she said, coaxed God to reveal a desired secret. But more than that. The entire series of fun events she had enacted with me was, I had no doubt, a holy ceremony that was as effective in invoking divine allies as any austere religious ritual could ever be. In fact, the more I meditated on it, the more I was sure that Jumbler was already a maestro in blending trickiness and morality.

“And now I will ask you another favor, dear Sin-Eater,” Jumbler said, her lips poised again in front of mine. “As I pour all my sins into my tears, please eat them. Devour my sins, that I may be free of that
which hinders my ability to become the most hedonistic servant of humanity possible.”

As I set about my task, I visualized her tears filling up with any toxins she might be harboring in body or psyche. With my psychic eye, I saw oily vapors, wraith-like shapes, leaving their hiding place in her heart as they migrated into the tears that I was now disposing of. What specific bad behavior or negative habits might they correspond to in Jumbler? Excessive mysteriousness, perhaps? A tendency towards confabulation? I could not guess. But that didn’t matter to me.