The Televisionary Oracle (49 page)

I can’t believe she’s serious.

“You have every right to be suspicious and resistant. I’d be disappointed in you if you weren’t. Slavish devotion to authority is near the top of our ugly list. But we have very good reasons for asking these things of you. Though it’s literally impossible for you to believe this right now, they would create wonderful changes in your life. They certainly aren’t for our benefit. And besides, you have absolute freedom of choice. We’re not begging you to join us.”

Until this moment, I have been playing with Rapunzel. I have been riding along on the half-conscious fantasy that we are like sophisticated children enjoying a game, and that playing the game is more meaningful and important than any real consequences that might come out of it.

It’s the story of my life. I always do this. It’s one of my trademark assets, even as it’s a signature flaw. Maybe it’s because I’m a creative artist who has had a relatively trauma-free life. Most of my important decisions revolve around how to produce those simulations of life called songs and poems and performances. Imagination is the legal tender in my little corner of the world. My devotion to it makes it easy for me to act as if I’m still living in the land of childhood, as if everyone I encounter is eager and willing to join me in that land for as long as we’re together. It could be the clerk at the gas station or my bandmates or my mother. I pretend or assume or theorize that they’re all just a prod away from sharing my obsession with turning every experience into a tricky myth. Maybe they’re normally entranced by the plague of literalism that stinks up the world, but when I touch their lives—so I reason—they’ll play along with me for a while, as we might have when we were five-year-olds or before we were born, when we were angels.

Until this moment, I have been convinced that Rapunzel understands this perspective implicitly, and has accepted all of its rules. Now I don’t know. I can still manage to interpret her “assignments” as gambits in a meta-game, but the consequences are more real than I would like. Couldn’t she have asked me to do something more playful and mythical, like let her walk me as a dog on a leash downtown or find
out what it’s like to wear a menstrual pad and a crown of lilies for four days?

I’ve loved this flirtation with “menarche for men” from the “Menstrual Temple,” which for all I know exists only in the imagination of Rapunzel. I do, after all, have a long history of being drawn to half-mad women whose imaginations so thoroughly bleed over into their “real” lives that it’s often difficult to know what’s objectively true about them. I guess maybe my attraction to the Menstrual Temple has really just been a stand-in for my fascination with Rapunzel’s imagination. I’m not sure I have truly believed there is such a thing as the Menstrual Temple; or if there is, whether I would want to accept all the actual consequences of aligning my fate with its. I half-assedly assumed I was just playing out an especially amusing seduction that would lead me to Rapunzel’s love, not some real cult that was going to ask me to make over my life.

But let’s assume for a moment that there is an actual entity called the Menstrual Temple and a real ritual called “Menarche for Men.” As intriguing as they sound, I can’t truly envision myself throwing away my rock career to partake. What benefits might they bestow on me that could possibly justify such drastic action?

“Before I even consider your outlandish proposals, Rapunzel,” I say finally, stalling. “I’m going to have to ask you to sell me on the advantages of Menstrual Temple membership. Do you have a brochure or something? A prospectus?”

“What if I told you the Menstrual Temple has a drug-free strategy to insinuate you into altered states that are so far beyond the lucidity and ecstatic intensity of any dreams you’ve ever had—and I know you’ve had a lot—that you will swear you’ve discovered a new dimension to live in? This dimension has all the fabulously erotic and kinesthetic adventures of the dream realm plus all the solid reality and recall of your waking hours.”

“I’d be piqued, but I don’t know if I’d be piqued enough to renounce one of the great loves of my life.”

“And what if I told you that an even greater love of your life will remain unavailable to you until you graduate from World Entertainment War?”

“Could you find it in your cold cruel heart to give me a hint of what
that bigger and better love of my life might look like?”

“I don’t want to create any false impressions. The majestic gift that’s awaiting your transmutation is so far beyond your current ability to conceive that any clues I might drop would be misleading. However, I will reveal this much. It would not be a lie to say that in the last hour you have been freshly delivered into the hint of a watered-down version of the majestic gift.”

I can’t help it if my heart and all the erotic nerves it’s linked to leap to the conclusion that maybe possibly hopefully the majestic gift in question is Rapunzel herself—not just in the getting-to-know-each-other mode she’s unveiling now, but in her refulgent splendor, primed by my love to engulf me with a sweet cataclysm of tender mercy. If I could believe that quitting World Entertainment War would annihilate obstacles that kept Rapunzel from signing on as my girlfriend, I would sincerely consider risking what was otherwise unthinkable. In the course of my romantic career, I have, after all, pulled off some extremely strenuous stunts and sacrifices in the name of love.

I recall the comical initiations Cassidy made me go through before she’d let me fuck her. Singing “The Impossible Dream” in crowded cafes, maintaining a .350 batting average in a softball league, shoplifting doll furniture for her from every toy store in town. Then there was that time—I almost forgot about this one—when she had me strip stark naked at 3
A.M
. and ride my one-speed bike four miles straight uphill from downtown to the university—while maintaining a hard-on the entire way. She followed me, of course, in her yellow VW bug, to make sure I didn’t cheat.

Performance art stuff like that, though, was fun and, moreover, an addition to my repertoire as an artist—not a subtraction, as Rapunzel is proposing. Sacrifice is a trick I’ve always been willing to try if and only if it pumps up the luster of my dionysian lovability.

“OK, Rapunzel,” I say. “You’ve got me fermenting. But tell me this. Why oh why—I can’t imagine why—is the price for these treasures you’re teasing me with so unreasonable? How could my access to them require the destruction of my music career? It doesn’t make any sense. From everything I can tell, your philosophy of life is to do what you love to do. Well, I love singing and dancing and being a Dionysian priest. I love being possessed by the snake god.”

“I didn’t say you had to stop singing or dancing and being a Dionysian priest, nor do I mean for you to divorce the snake god. My point is to get you to do what you love, only better. To figure out how to untangle your divine motivations from the diseased motivations, and then channel your wonderful talent into sacred pranks that will accomplish the only thing worth doing.”

“Which is?”

“Ahh. Yes. More about that later. If and when you decide to kidnap yourself. If and when you commit to cultivating the states the alchemists call putrefaction and nigredo: melting down the half-sick, half-beautiful containers your libido inhabits, and returning for a time to what we affectionately call primordial chaos.”

“I’m scared.”

“That’s a good sign. It means you’re actually entertaining my proposal.”

“But it’s all so sudden.”

“There’s no rush. You know what the occultists say: The magician proceeds as if she has all of eternity at her disposal.”

“I still wish there was a brochure you could give me to study. A prospectus. A holy tome.”

“Those types of artifacts exist, but they’re exactly what you don’t need right now. You’re overstuffed with intellectual knowledge and second-hand information. The most precious and instructive experience for you is what we in the consciousness industry call gnosis. Direct perception unmediated by other people’s theories.”

“So where can you steer me if I want to gather more data to help me make my decision? What should I do?”

“How about this? How’d you like to sample a class at our Dreamtime University? I can arrange for you, anytime you want, to get a fresh hot delivery, in your dreams, of infomania that’ll be quite helpful to you as you carry out the prerequisites for signing up with the Menstrual Temple. When would you like it? Tonight?”

I’m skeptical. What is she, the most powerful psychic in America, able to induce a specific dream in my psyche on command?

“In fact,” she continues, “I can absolutely guarantee that it’ll be the most real dream you’ve ever had. The most detailed. The most voluminous. Not only have you never had a dream as long and rich as this
one—you’ve never come anywhere close to remembering so much of any dream as you will of this one. It’s as if the dream itself will give you a memory upgrade so you can remember it.

“And you should also know that there’s plenty more where this superdream comes from. Membership in the Menstrual Temple has thousands of perks, but the privilege of communing with superdreams at Dreamtime University has got to be one of the biggest luxuries.”

“Anything else?”

“Lots of treasures besides the ones I’ve told you about. I’ll just mention one other one.”

“Free tickets to the dark underbelly of Disneyland?”

“Nope. Better than that. An end to your low wages.”

“This janitor job I’m going to get must be pretty lucrative.”

“You’d be surprised.”

Rapunzel is beginning to put her crampons back on.

“So does your offer to arrange a superdream for me have any strings attached?” I ask. “If I formally beg you for it, am I committed to do your will forever? I mean, if I agree to accept your fresh hot delivery, do I automatically have to quit the band?”

“Of course not. Think of it as a free sample. An introductory offer. You know, the first one’s free, but the price goes up once you’re hooked.”

“OK. I accept. Now as to when I’d like it delivered. The band’s got another gig tonight, and—well—I get into a pretty wacky state. Always have my beers and coffees. Always dance myself into exhaustion and absorb the id-charged projections of hundreds of people. My dreams the night after are usually pretty fragmented. So anyway, tonight wouldn’t be a good time. How about tomorrow night?”

“You’re on. By the way, do you know what ‘rockstar’ backwards is?”

“Ratskcor?”

“Yup. Rat’s core. And now it’s time for me to go.”

“Can I get your phone number?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for me to contact you. Too bad you’re not already signed up to the Menstrual Temple, because then you could bypass the more mundane forms of communication and reach me directly through the Drivetime.”

“And what exactly did you say the Drivetime is?”

“Next time, Rockstar. Gotta go.”

She grabs the bull skull origami on my altar, the one she’d given me a month ago during the party at the newspaper offices.

“Maybe you’re ready to receive the oracle I tried to handfeed you way back when. Why don’t you finally open this sucker up?”

She flings the origami at me, climbs out the window, and scoots back down the way she came in.

I drag myself out of bed and peer out at her. The woman is fast. She’s already ripping off her crampons. Soon she’s scurrying out of my yard, brushing by the eight-foot-tall bushes that line the front boundary.

I lower myself down on the sacred spot on the chair where she’d been sitting and examine the origami. For the first time I notice on the back, in very tiny letters, the words “open me.” Wonder how I missed seeing that until now.

Unfolding it, I find a text with print so small I can barely read it. I fetch the magnifying glass that came with my Oxford English Dictionary and discern the following:

The Televisionary Oracle

In the best-known version of the Greek myth, Persephone is dragged down into the underworld by Pluto and held hostage. But in earlier, pre-patriarchal tales, she descends there under her own power, actively seeking to graduate from her virginal naivete by exploring the intriguing land of shadows. Which of these approaches to higher (or should we say
lower?
) education do you prefer: imposed against your will or initiated under your own power? It really is up to you, and you should decide pretty soon. Maybe it’ll help you make your decision if we tell you that according to ancient lore, the dusky realm to which Persephone journeyed is a place of hidden wealth.