The Televisionary Oracle (16 page)

“By
any
means?” I asked the still small voice.

“The obstacle to passionate commitment is your feeling that an important part of your self is not being included in the mix,” the still small voice replied unhysterically. “If the only way to include that part of you is through rebellion and rejection, so be it.”

“So you’re saying, basically,” I questioned the voice further, “that in order to become the avatar, I should reject becoming the avatar?”

“Yes,” soothed the voice, “at least as your mothers understand the role of the avatar. Who knows? The real avatar might be something very different from what your mothers imagine. And you’ll never find out if that’s true unless you wound your mothers’ model.”

I couldn’t believe it at first. It was such a tricky thing for my still small voice to tell me. And yet it was speaking to me in the same direct and low-key tones I had long come to regard as a measure of its authenticity.

I had to make one more test. “OK, still small voice,” I said with my inner whisper, “so in order to become an unselfish messiah working for the good of all humanity, I am not just being allowed but actually encouraged to be a selfish little brat.”

“Now you’re talking melodramatic nonsense,” the voice signaled back. “It’s not being a selfish brat to make a symbolic statement of resistance against an oppression that needs to be undone.”

I had copped the perfect rationalization for refusing to menstruate, and it wasn’t even a rationalization at all. It was a righteous sanctification. My meditations in the coming weeks, along with my dreaming mind’s vivid replies to my incubation quest, gradually built up in
me an understanding of the subtle visualizations I needed to practice in order to accomplish my goal. (Rumbler even showed up twice in dreams, once in a classroom where he lifted me up on his shoulders so I could get a look at a blackboard that was too high to read, and another time in a bathtub, where he washed moldy red bugs out of my hair.)

A little more than a month later, I knew beyond a doubt that I’d set in place all the inner adjustments necessary. On a cool August morning I woke up with the gift of a sign: a dream of a blood-red bull skull turning pale white right in front of my eyes.

More than five years later, I had still not acquiesced to nature.

From time to time, my seven mothers made efforts to get my flow going, though most were pretty timid. There were polite dress rehearsals and group prayer sessions and herbal treatments and trips to doctors and midwives. My moms were holding back from acting as hog-wild as they felt because they couldn’t be sure my amenorrhea wasn’t ordained by Goddess Herself. None of our scriptures or prophecies mentioned anything about the avatar not menstruating, but then again they didn’t say she—I mean I—
did
menstruate.

There was also the fact that several of my mothers had dreams that could be interpreted as sanctioning my barren state. Vimala, for instance, had a doozy in which she watched me as I emerged from a cave dripping wet with a vulture on either shoulder—a sure sign that this was a vision directly from Persephone. As I strode towards my mother, she dropped to her knees as if in supplication. I handed her a large reddish egg and muttered, “Take, eat, for this is my body, which is given for thee.” Cracking it open, she found it was empty.

The signs and portents changed, though, once I reached sixteen. Artemisia woke up sobbing on the summer solstice, having just dreamed of me collapsing in her lap and crying, “I want to learn the power of those who bleed but do not die.” Cecily’s twelve-year-old biological daughter Lilly had her menarche in July, and on the night after the ceremony both mother and child dreamed of me standing at the edge of a ritual circle with grief and longing, as if I wanted to come in but couldn’t.

The garden that year was bizarrely and inexplicably unproductive,
and even the fox and raccoons and deer and skunks were noticeably sparse. I felt the same as ever, at least in my mothers’ domain if not in Melted Popsicle Land (whose name had changed to the “Televisionarium,” as in television + terrarium), but everyone else seemed to think that I wasn’t making as much progress in my lessons, and that I had suddenly become less wise in the advice I was so often called on to dispense.

As I look back now, I surmise that my evolving relationship with Rumbler was covertly messing with the collective mood of the Pomegranate Grail. Unbeknownst to everyone else—thanks to my perfect secrecy (and apparent ability to dissociate)—their avatar was indulging in an ever more intense and intimate exchange with male energy. True, the unknown polluter wasn’t officially a human being, by normal definitions. But maybe that made his influence all the more profound. Rumbler was more beautiful and smart and interesting and fun than any imperfect boy could ever be. I opened my heart to him in ways I could never have done for anyone else.

Who knows? Maybe Rumbler and I would never have gone as far as we did if my mothers had granted me the time and permission to go on dates with actual guys. While Vimala and company were never shy about giving me the lowdown on sex—it was included in my curriculum—they were adamant that I would not even be able to think about romantic liaisons until I was eighteen. Even then—so I was brainwashed to believe—I wouldn’t have much interest in such things; my destiny led in another direction.

Thank Goddess for Jordan and Elijah, the sons of Artemisia and Cecily, respectively, who grew up in large part in our community. Without their matter-of-fact presence in my life, Rumbler would have been my only break from unisex monasticism. But they were too different in age for me to brew up any flirtations.

No. If I wanted to go out on dates—if I wanted to improvise with the mystery of erotic attraction—I had only one choice: my best friend from the Televisionarium.

Still, it did not occur to me at first that he could be the solution to the strange longings that began to stir in me at age thirteen going on fourteen. Our timeless time together in the woods was filled with epic but innocent adventures, like journeys to see the Queen of Rats, who
laughed beautiful stories for our ears alone, or leaps off the tops of our special tree, Fortify, whose supernatural help allowed us to fly over rivers of fire that we could not otherwise find.

Our first kiss came not in the Televisionarium but in a dream a few weeks before my fifteenth birthday. As the dream began, I was high above Rumbler, standing on a giant purple popsicle that was carved in the shape of a balcony jutting out of a purple popsicle tower. Gazing down, I could see him through clear water curled up in a ball at the bottom of a river. “Let’s meet in the middle,” he gurgled up to me as he launched himself towards the surface. Without thinking, I threw myself off the balcony. I fell in slow motion and felt a surge of sweetness welling up all over my body.

I landed safely on a boat that was also a bed. He was already there, acting as if he were just waking from a long sleep. “There’s blood in your bed,” I whispered to him, pointing to a red blotch on the sheet. “Yeah,” he murmured back, “I just had my very first period.
One
of us had to.”

He chuckled as he made the last comment and moved into a position where his hands were around my waist and his mouth on my belly button. Slowly he kissed his way up my abdomen, unbuttoning my white blouse as he progressed. At the center of my chest he said a prayer—“Dear Goddess, let me be the boy behind the girl, the man behind the woman”—as he ran his tongue along the two arms of my scar.

Finally his face arrived in front of mine. For a while we barely pressed our lips together as both of us hummed the song “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Currents of heat were running down my legs and arms. Dizzying music was circling through my belly and pelvis. My hair felt as if it were as alive with sensation as the rest of me. Snakey strands floated out away from my head as if I were in zero gravity.

We stayed like that for a long time. My scary joy grew steadily bigger and wilder, until I wondered if I might die. I couldn’t believe, didn’t trust, how full I felt. Then, unexpectedly, Rumbler and I touched our tongues together and rolled them around the inside of each other’s lips. Suddenly, all the jangly, fuzzy electricity that had been pulsing crazily around inside me became very lucid and pointed. From a lazily swirling sweetness I mutated into a well-organized grid of fierce bliss—
bliss that somehow felt as if it had an intention and will of its own. At the center of this grid was my heart, which was fluttering in a way that was both terrifying and gratifying. I wasn’t sure if I was having a heart attack or the opposite of a heart attack—a heart expanse? Finally I felt an engulfing squeeze, then a delicious eruption that was simultaneously the taste of dark purple grapes and the sound of a cello and the smell of the ocean at dawn and the sight of an orange moon rising over a green hill. I woke from the dream awash in tearful rapture. The phrase “drenched in heart river” was echoing over and over in the back of my throat.

The dream was a taboo-breaker, an eye-opener, a hunch-generator. A few days later I smuggled myself into the Televisionarium bursting with a hypothesis I had never before entertained. Could my best friend and I give each other the same pleasure here that we’d had in the dream?

The answer was a thousand times yes. In the very first experiment, I danced with him cheek to cheek in an underground garden where giant, seed-laden sunflower heads burned like inexhaustible torches with blue flames. We jumped in mud puddles as we twirled and put four-leaf clovers on each other’s tongues. When I dared to press my lips against his, he raised his eyebrows and laughed, “What revolution is this?” And when I picked him up and wrapped his legs around my waist, waltzing him around the diamond ladder as if he were my darling, he howled with shocked joy. “Bind me to you,” he sang, spurring me on as he so often did, and I danced him over to an oak where the mistletoe hung down in fountainlike tufts. Using two such stems, we tied my left hand to his right. The kiss that began then did not stop until we disappeared together in a reverie of the thermonuclear ecstasy at the heart of the sun.

So began a new phase of our old relationship—infatuated courtship. It did not replace our epic play, only enhanced it. During the ensuing months, I sought him out in both dreams and the Televisionarium more often than I ever had before. I was not obsessed—one who was trained to be as balanced as I was is not capable of that state—but I was assuredly in love.

From what I could tell, our blooming union improved my concentration on the educational tasks my mothers pressed me so hard to master. I felt lighter, less resentful of my benevolent incarceration as
the avatar. My need to inject humor into all the dry details of my rhythm had less of an edge.

And yet there was no mistaking the fact that my mothers’
joie de vivre
was declining as mine waxed. No doubt this had to do with their growing frustration at my failure to menstruate. What had been a rationalizable glitch in their master plan when I was thirteen or fourteen years old had evolved into a potential refutation of the master plan itself.

But in retrospect I am positive that my love affair with Rumbler was at least partially responsible for the ever-souring mood that climaxed just before the winter solstice seven months after my sixteenth birthday. What my mothers weren’t consciously aware of, they were being affected by on subconscious levels. I was like a married person who was secretly cheating on my mate. A third party was mutating the chemistry of our community, and my mothers had no idea.

An almost hysterical undertone had begun to pervade the atmosphere of the Santa Cruz chapter of the Pomegranate Grail. Yet while this superficially suggests there was an overabundance of emotions, I noticed an increasing dryness in the way we all related to each other. There were fewer of the warm, pleasing surprises I’d come to expect from my interactions. Compliments seemed forced. The temple rituals lacked the full-bodied passion I’d grown used to.

The first two weeks of December seemed to be the most depressing I’d ever witnessed—not for me, of course: I was in love. Everyone else was miserable or down or dishwater grey. Vimala cried every day. No one wanted to cook. The pomegranate orchard had produced a pitiful harvest of tiny fruits.

On December 16, an emergency summit convened. Not only were my seven mothers in attendance, but all the other thirty-two members of the Pomegranate Grail who lived in the vicinity, as well as fifty-three grave-faced honchos from chapters as far away as Melbourne, Australia. There it was decided, after long, rancorous debate, that my problem had gone on long enough: It was time to fix it with a forceful act of ritual magic. This was by no means a unanimous decision; barely a majority, actually.

The next day I was installed, bed and all, inside a ceremonial circle
in the temple. For the next four days, until the climactic ritual on the solstice, I was at the mercy of the mojo. The women massaged my belly and body till I was gooey jello. For food they fed me nothing but cranberries, pomegranates, plums, and eggplants. For drink I was forced to rely entirely on an emetic tea composed of pennyroyal, blue cohosh, tansy, and false unicorn root. Songs were sung over me, chants chanted. Talismans that looked to have been forged when the world was young were pressed against my belly, and the name of Persephone was invoked so many times I grew to feel as if I were made out of it.

I still wasn’t ready to rescind my order to my reproductive system. I mean I
was
in awe of the rigamarole that had been summoned to oppose my secret pact. And part of me felt like, what the hell, if it’s really that important to you, I’ll give you your damn menstrual blood already. But another part of me wanted to test my power. Was curious about who would win the battle. Longed to know who, when it came down to it, really controlled my destiny.

And so I stuck to my guns. Even as the horde of magicians hovered around me, drumming their fervent intention into me with breathtaking ferocity, I was silently instructing my body to hold its course.