The Televisionary Oracle (54 page)

“Actually,” Rumbler said, “there
is
a marketing division of Drivetime University. A whole phalanx of marketing teachers awaits Rapunzel’s arrival.”

“I can’t believe we’re talking about this,” Jumbler marveled. “It’s certainly a day for firsts. My first joint shamanic trip into the Drivetime. My first shamanic conversation ever about marketing.”

“Has the dissident propaganda you’re preaching been approved by Madame Blavatsky?” I asked Rumbler, dubious. “Is this all an official part of my Drivetime University curriculum? Especially the part about adding men to the choir I preach to.”

“My Damn Latchkey!” Rumbler shouted. “My Damn Latchkey!”

As my eternal secretary puttered up to the doorway of the redwood husk on her oversized tricycle, she was wiping her mouth with the back of her arm.

“You require my august presence?” she gurgled.

“My Damn Latchkey,” Rumbler said to her, “your ineffable ward here is wondering if I speak with your authority when I counsel her to upgrade her marketing skills and reach out to the masses. She’s particularly scoffing at my hint that she should invite some selected men to join her exclusive girls’ club.”

“You do not have to physically fuck
all
the men,” Madame Blavatsky growled. “Spiritually you do, of course, in the Drivetime. But physically only a small fraction. What was the figure I worked out? Point zero two percent of point zero two percent. Not that many, really, as long as they are the right men. That should be good enough to infect the whole global gang of phallus-bearers.”

I was apoplectic. “
Fuck
them?! What are you talking about?!”

“It will certainly not be fucking in the patriarchal sense of the word,” Madame Blavatsky said blandly. “But the specifics about that will be revealed a little later. For now, think of your task as a kind of mass mercy-fucking. For the good of the planet.”

“Shouldn’t I be at least a little concerned about what’s good for
me?
”

“To the tiny little ego into which you have stuffed your vast primordial self, it sounds extreme. But remember, Queen Giggleshtupper, this is one of those decisions you yourself made while ensconced in the more eternal perspective, if you know what I mean. I am merely serving as your secretary. Reminding you of your agenda.”

“I told you to remind me to turn myself into a kind of glorified sacred prostitute?” I laughed with disbelief. “I, the avatar of a mystery school that has only accepted women as members for millennia?”

“There is no better way to set the healing infection in motion,” Madame Blavatsky said with curt certainty, taking a sip from a bottle of wine, “than to administer the tantric yoni juju directly to a few elite contagious agents among the beloved enemy. It will make the Drivetime aspect of your work far more effective. Besides, you will have plenty of time to get ready. The earliest possible launch date for you
to become Global Initiatrix of the Fuckissimus would be five years from now.”

“OK, Rumbler,” I said, setting my not-quite-finished popsicle down on a brown leaf, “time out.” I lifted his head up off the ground and looked him in the eyes. “I’ve come to enjoy Madame Blavatsky in the short time I’ve known her, but I don’t know how much I trust her. Your word, on the other hand, I swear by. So tell me. Are you and Blavatsky sincerely offering me a new dispensation about my life’s mission, or is this your idea of a prank?”

“It’s a trade-off, Rapunzel,” he said. “The men will come to you to be filled up with the mysteries of menstruation, and you will exploit their openness in order to infect them with the Psychefunkapus meme. They get something and you get something. Remember what I said. You can’t kill the bad apocalypse without them. You can’t resurrect the good apocalypse without them.”

“Just as long as you don’t try to tell us,” Jumbler fired in, “that she needs these men for personal reasons; that only a male can bring out the real woman in her. That kind of scripture tends to make me subject to projectile vomiting.”

“You have my word,” said Rumbler. “I won’t say that. But I will say that she needs men in order to reach her full potential as an avatar. No way around it. The bad apocalypse
will
occur unless she infects the male of the species with the Psychefunkapus meme.”

Jumbler stuck out her tongue and gave Rumbler a long, hard raspberry.

“And tell me again what the Psychefunkapus meme is?” I asked.

“Lust globally, fuck locally,” Rumbler said.

“Meaning you should desire every halfway attractive person you encounter, but only make love to your committed partner?”

“That’s one way to interpret it.”

“What are the other ways?”

“Get in the habit of cultivating a tender, appreciative lust for everyone. And I do mean
everyone
. Convince yourself with brilliantly rational arguments why it makes total sense to overflow with hot-blooded compassion for all of creation. And I do mean
all
of creation—the wetlands and the libraries and the hummingbirds and the highways. And then infuse that well-crafted, unconditional generosity into the
love you give to any imperfectly beautiful consort you actually fuck.”

“Sounds strenuous.”

“At first it will be. After a while it will become second nature.”

“Jumbler,” I said, placing my hand on hers, “I need your counsel. Speak freely, please.”

“I’m afraid this is coming dangerously close to being just another in a long line of history’s famous megalomaniacal fantasies, my dear,” Jumbler said with a hint of an emotion I had not yet seen in her—disgust. “Not L. Ron Hubbard or Allah’s prophet Mohammed or Mao Zedong as the One True Way, but Rapunzel Blavatsky. Just because I love the way your mind works and share all your values, my dear, doesn’t mean I want you to be the resplendent saviour that everyone in the world needs to worship or even fuck in a non-patriarchal fashion, whatever that means. ‘Global Initiatrix’ is another term for ‘Fascist Uber-Guru’ if you ask me.”

“Please, Jesus,” Rumbler said to Jumbler with a hint of defensiveness. “It’s poetic license. We’re playing with caricatures. We’re making fun of ourselves. Of course we’re not proposing that Rapunzel purge all her competitors and rule the mass imagination alone. But neither do we want to repress all thoughts about the danger of that fantasy taking root in the back of her lovely mind. That would surely make us fall prey to the poison we want to avoid.”

“Yes, I understand that principle well,” Jumbler admitted. “It’s the heart of the tantric teaching. Whatever darkness you ignore will always sneak up from behind and bite you in the ass eventually.”

“Rapunzel is not the Great Exception,” Madame Blavatsky croaked as she rocked her tricycle backwards and forwards and scooped what looked like deep-fried shrimp out of her bowl.

“Exactly,” said Rumbler. “She’s merely the Great Example, a role model who shows how it’s done. I call her the avatar, but everyone who lusts globally and fucks locally is a potential avatar, too. The goal is six billion masters of Psychefunkapus.”

“But she must still be a charismatic superstar,” Madame Blavatsky added. “That is the only way she will get enough recruits for Twenty-Two Weeks of World Orgasm.”

She pedaled her tricycle in a half-circle so she was facing away from us. “Hop on, Queen Sexlaugher,” she called over her shoulder. “Let
me take you back to your kidnap of the airwaves. Come on—you too, girlfriend. You too, Rumbler.”

I climbed aboard the step on the back of the tricycle and held on to Madame Blavatsky’s shoulders. Jumbler was able to squeeze on, clutching my waist. Rumbler jumped up on the handlebars, barely keeping his butt from sinking down into the food in Madame Blavatsky’s basket. We took off with difficulty, but soon picked up speed.

Peddling furiously, Madame Blavatsky took us out a door and into the woods. She proceeded down a narrow paved road that cut a swath through strange buildings. There was not a single rectangular shape among them—ziggurats, tepees, domes, and pyramids predominated—and they appeared to be made out of giant rubies and amethysts and topazes and emeralds. Next to each front door, which was lozenge-shaped, was a neon sign. “The Eater of Cruelty” read one. Others said “Feminist Orgy Network,” “Center for Tantric Janitorism,” “Telepathics Anonymous,” and “Drivetime University Presents: How a Global Network of Menstrual Huts Can Stave Off Apocalypse.”

After a few minutes of traveling down this road, we began to hear the hubbub of a large crowd. Soon we came into view of a huge structure that towered over the landscape. It was a stadium. Madame Blavatsky wheeled us inside through tall double doors.

The place was packed with a sea of people, most of whom were wearing only the skimpiest clothes. It was shocking to see so much flesh all at once.

At the opposite end of the stadium was the biggest Televisionary Oracle of them all—maybe a hundred feet square. Dominating the screen was a person who looked like me, only about ten years older: same as last time. Dressed in a green and black tweed kimono and sporting the same pimple on her forehead, The Other Rapunzel was in a television news room with several large video cameras on gurneys and numerous TV monitors. There was also a black altar surmounted by a huge bird’s nest, around which a number of lingerie-clad women were kneeling. With a huge, translucent squirt gun, The Other Rapunzel was shooting streams of thick red juice into their mouths.

Madame Blavatsky shooed us off her tricycle and dismounted herself, bidding us to climb a dais and sit down next to her on a circular rug with a mandala design.

“I love all of you,” The Other Rapunzel thundered in a voice that felt like an earthquake. “You know that, right? In fact, I love you
more
than I love you. And that’s why, unlike every other journalist, scientist, politician, priest, celebrity, or teacher you’ve had to deal with all your life, I’m going to confess my biases upfront. I’ll tell you that my body feels pretty strange right now—sort of like a dizzy sow stuffed with junk food.

“It’s the first day of my period, you see. I’m three sizes too big for my body. The only thing that’s keeping me from biting the heads off small animals are four tablets of Advil and two bottles of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

“Right now it’s a real struggle for me to maintain my usual high standards of compassionate objectivity. For all I know, I’m not succeeding. For all I know, my tender wisdom has been twisted off center just enough to have turned me into just another hypocritical phony.

“I don’t think so, but I wanted to warn you.

“Take this as a disclaimer, then: Question my authority and expertise with the same rigor as you would the anchormen who feed you your regular doses of the daily newzak or the high priests of the American Medical Association or the strong men who embody your personal ideal of competence.

“Although of course none of their ilk would ever have the courageous self-knowledge to admit that the state of their bodies might be subliminally mutilating their truths. Alpha males rarely recognize that their ‘logic’ is in secret service to their repressed emotions, which always leak out in physical symptoms.

“But I’m sorry to sound so hateful. For my sake as much as yours.

“Every time I conjure a compact meme of poetic logic that’s crammed full of bile, I risk turning one more pocket of my brain cells into a slimy imitation of the ancient disease called phallocracy. And whenever I do that, I aid and abet the apocalypse. Which is the exact opposite of my mission.

“Therefore, I hereby retract my vicious emotion. I do not renounce my objective analysis, but I do retract the nastiness I wrapped it in.

“I do not hate you evil advertising geniuses who turn everything into money-colored shit. I do not hate you satanic Christians who fear the human body. I do not hate you fatherly journalists who exult in
selling us every last detailed story of murder and mayhem as if it were a blessed treasure.

“In fact, I love you all. I love you
more
than I love you. At this very moment, I am sending tender telepathic regards to deadbeat dads and wife-beaters everywhere. I am beaming sweet gobs of kindness in the direction of arms dealers and psychotically emotionless middle-aged men in lab coats speaking in know-it-all cadences and every last macho politician spouting football metaphors to illustrate how much fun it is to destroy the English language.

“I celebrate all of you with the same lucid joy I rain down upon all the people who help me and agree with me.

“I must confess that I did not master this technique willingly.

“Frankly, the Goddess Persephone forced me into it. She proved to me that the only way to overthrow the goddamn fucking phallocracy—which is also our only hope for killing the bad apocalypse and awakening the good apocalypse—turns out to be … to love the goddamn fucking phallocracy.

“Ha! A thousand times ha!

“But wait a minute.

“Dangerous ground here.

“Don’t want you to get the idea that this is a repackaged version of ‘turn the other cheek.’

“I am not saying be nicey-nice to the bad daddies while they stick voodoo pins in the globe.

“Fight them with all your heart and mind and soul, yes; pull out every trick you have to thwart their mad rush towards collective suicide; but just make sure that you don’t infect yourself with their poison. Swear that you will never dehumanize them even if they dehumanize you.

“Smash the phallocracy with sympathetic grace!

“Feel gratitude for the clarity it invokes in you and for the self-corrections it forces you to craft.

“Kill it with sweet kindness.

“Love it to death.”

The Other Rapunzel paused. For a moment the throng was virtually silent. Then a rolling cheer broke out. It soon grew so loud that the
dais began to vibrate beneath us. Parts of the crowd began to chant, “Kill your own death! Kill your own death!”

While The Other Rapunzel had been ranting, my three viewing companions had moved closer to me. Madame Blavatsky stood behind me, playing with my hair and massaging my scalp. Jumbler and Rumbler had made me into the centerpiece of a sandwich. They each sat facing my side with their legs wrapped around me. With one hand Rumbler stroked my belly and with the other my back, all the while kissing my shoulder and whispering a wordless tune in my ear. Jumbler caressed my thigh and butt as she butterflied her lips along my neck.