The Televisionary Oracle (22 page)

In Bookshop Santa Cruz I bought maps of each area. At the public library I found phone books from each area and xeroxed copies of the Yellow Pages listings for plastic surgeons, hotels, and boarding houses.

I didn’t want to make my long-distance calls from the Sanctuary, since that would leave clues about my ultimate whereabouts on the phone bills. So I got a load of change and used the pay phone in front of the library. After an hour, I’d made my decision: San Rafael, the main city in Marin. There was a budget motel there which I had passed during my previous visits. It was on Lincoln Street, not too far from the main drag.

Many of Marin’s plastic surgeons seemed to have congregated in nearby Greenbrae, a few miles away via bus. I called three of them and each indicated a willingness to take my case.

None of the receptionists would discuss specifics with me, but I knew from my earlier research that annihilating the repulsive brown stain would take at least a couple of surgeries six weeks apart. They would be followed by another few weeks’ recuperation before the final step: sanding down the scar.

I was going to have to relocate for a minimum of ten weeks. Expenses for food and lodging, added to the cost of the surgery, could run as much as five thousand dollars. To be safe, I decided I needed at least six thousand dollars.

The next problem was how to raise such a sum. The million-dollar trust fund that Vimala and company allegedly had going for me wouldn’t be available any time soon. Though my moms usually bought me anything I asked for, they gave me a mere one hundred fifty dollars a week in spending money. That wouldn’t accumulate very fast even if I did become amazingly frugal.

No way was I going to get a job. Could I sell some of my belongings
at a flea market? “Get a fine collection of genuine Goddess prayer cloths here, just five bucks apiece.” That seemed tawdry. Same with the idea of hocking my belongings at a pawn shop. Too bad no one outside my little community knew I was a shining avatar and the reincarnation of Mary Magdalen. If they did, I could have hawked my doodles or old shoes for exorbitant sums.

I was tempted to surreptitiously start my “ministry” years ahead of schedule. The gospel according to my mothers was that the world wouldn’t be ready for me and vice versa until I was twenty-five. But maybe in the meantime I could somehow figure out a way to get paid for doing psychic readings and healings. Besides the fact that charging money for my gifts was a big no-no, however, there was also the problem of where I would conduct my business. Bringing clients out to the Sanctuary was not a possibility. I could see about renting an office down in Santa Cruz, but my availability for appointments would be severely limited. With all my lessons, exercises, rituals, and duties, my moms had me on an extremely rigorous schedule which afforded me precious few breaks.

A brilliantly perverse solution to the fund-raising problem bubbled up in me one evening in early March. Wouldn’t you know it was during my next four-day vacation in the menstrual hut? I’m sure it was no accident that I was having my first bout with severe cramps at the time. It was almost as if my plan emerged as revenge against the pain in my womb. As if I could punish it by allowing my fantasies to turn extra nasty. The weird thing was that I could have asked my mothers for herbs to alleviate the agony, but refrained. I didn’t want to be deprived of my motivating power.

I was reclining in the same black leather chair in which I’d conjured up my epiphany a month earlier. Midnight had passed, and no one else was around. It was impossible to feel dreamy and meditative, however, since my insides were being meatgrindered through an electrified driftnet made of razor-sharp wires. Instead I stared at the altar in the center of the adytum and practiced cursing all the holy objects residing there.

“You goddamn fucking piece of shit,” I prayed in the direction of the magic mirror, in which it was said you could divine the flaws in your soul you needed most to correct if you hoped to die well.

Gazing straight at the precious figurine of a pregnant goddess, a sixty-five-hundred-year-old artifact recovered near Pazardzik, Bulgaria, I hissed, “You bull-cocksucking, snake shit-licking, pig-fucking whore.”

Words like these had never passed through my lips before, though I’d rehearsed them mentally from time to time after discovering a book on the anthropology of obscenities some years back.

I reached out and grabbed the deck of consecrated antique Tarot cards from their stand next to the mask of Persephone. The legends of the Pomegranate Grail asserted that they were created by Artemisia Gentileschi, a seventeenth-century Italian painter who was also a member of our order. I rifled through the deck until I found the Death card. I spit on it. “You limp-dicked eater of Goddess farts,” I told the dancing skeleton depicted there beneath my pool of saliva.

Replacing the deck on the altar, I seized my next victim: the Pomegranate Grail itself. My mothers firmly believed this silver cup to be the very vessel which Mary Magdalen used in the menstrual eucharist rites she established in the south of France twelve years after she fled there following Jesus’ crucifixion. And oh by the way, it was also alleged to be the container with which Christ served his disciples at the Last Supper.

Though I wanted to believe in the authenticity of the tales attached to this artifact, I had my doubts. Having read extensively about the Grail, I was well aware that there were many other claimants to the title of the cup used at the Last Supper.

As usual, it came down to herstory versus history; to my ancient order’s version of the course civilization had taken as opposed to everyone else’s version. Outside the membership of the Pomegranate Grail, there was probably not a Biblical scholar or archaeologist alive who would keep a straight face upon hearing the legends my mothers attributed to our sacred artifact. It looked old enough, for all I knew. But the scenes configured in relief on the side of the bowl were dramatically at odds with most conceptions of Christ’s message.

The vessel was about eight inches in diameter and five inches high. There were four panels around the outside circumference, each separated by the figure of a pomegranate cut open to reveal myriad seeds inside. The image on two panels was of two snakes intertwined around an equal-armed cross with a rose at the center. The other two showed
a man and woman in states of union. In one panel they were copulating in a seated position. In the other, they were fused, like hermaphroditic Siamese twins, and standing in a cauldron that appeared to be a larger version of the cup itself.

Back in January, when I first examined this object—which had been off-limits to me until my menarche—I was surprised. Why did one of the Pomegranate Grail’s most sacred relics portray a man in such a prominent role? I don’t mean to imply that my ancient order hated everything male. While my education placed a strong emphasis on the crimes of the patriarchy, I was always taught to adore and embody the beautiful qualities of the masculine archetype. My mothers insisted that in the glorious past, male and female lived in harmonious balance, bringing out the best in each other—and that they would one day be restored to that sublime symbiosis. In the meantime, it was up to us women to embody the beauty of both genders.

Still, I wasn’t fully prepared for the shock of seeing the couples portrayed on the Grail. And yet that was only a prelude to the next unexpected revelation. Back in January, on my first day back in class after my maiden voyage in the menstrual hut, my mothers had unveiled a staggering secret about the nature of my work. I was here on Earth not just to redeem the menstrual mysteries, they informed me. It was also my task to regenerate the mythic template of
hierosgamos:
sacred marriage.

There was a catch to this glorious assignment, however. I was to forever remain a virgin—not in the contemporary sense of the word, as in sexually innocent, but rather in its ancient meaning: complete unto oneself.

“You will never marry,” Vimala told me with an unctuous calm that I was sure belied the nervousness she must be harboring.

“I’m supposed to spread the gospel of hierosgamos without ever being married?” I protested, disbelieving.

“You must be the husband
and
the wife,” Vimala proclaimed quietly. “To compensate for the egregious imbalance unleashed when patriarchy expunged Magdalen’s role in the new covenant.”

The next moment was a crucifixion, an intersection of joy and anguish. My heart filled with the bountiful image of Rumbler. I immediately guessed that my clandestine bond with him in the Televisionarium
—a bond Vimala knew nothing about—was the sublime solution to her grotesque puzzle. Yet another part of me feigned ignorance of this secret and raged at Vimala’s unfairness. “How dare she curse me like this?!” I fumed.

It was the ultimate insult in my mothers’ drive to make me their puppet.

As I reclined now in the menstrual hut and seethed over these memories, cramps ripping at my center of gravity, I gazed down at the Pomegranate Grail in my hands. Sweet blasphemy welled up in me. “I ought to masturbate you with the devil’s dildo,” I murmured to the cup, “you slime-collecting, twat-mocking, garbage-worshiping scuzzbucket.”

I took the thing and put it on the end of my stockinged left foot. I twirled it around a few times, then kicked it up in the direction of my head. It landed on top perfectly, as if I’d been rehearsing for days. I jumped up and broke into a temple dance. It, too, was blasphemous. Here it was two and a half weeks before the spring equinox, and I was doing a dance that was forbidden to be done at any time but the feast of Samhain, October 31.

I skulked. I waggled like a demented snake. I mimed sliding down a fire pole into the infernal regions. Only once did my two-thousand-year-old silver hat fling itself off, and I caught it before it smacked the ground.

Finally I strode up to the altar and gazed into the magic mirror.

“Mirror, mirror, on the shrine:

“Speak, you bastard,

“Give me an apocalyptic sign.”

The bowl was crowning me in such a way that it half-covered my big brown birthmark. I jerked my head down so that the whole ugly thing showed, then jerked it up to turn me into a beautiful woman without a flaw.

And that’s when the brilliantly perverse solution flew into my evil mind. Adrenaline shot through me as my mind conjured a future event. I would sell the slime-collecting, twat-mocking, garbage-worshiping scuzzbucket. I would locate a collector of antiquities who’d be so glad to get it that he wouldn’t ask many questions. Thus would I raise the small fortune I needed to run away and free my forehead of its shame.

Thus would I once and for all show the ancient order of the Pomegranate Grail that I was its boss, not the other way around.

At 2 in the morning, I sneaked out of the menstrual hut down the outside stairs—being careful to prop the door open using a thick book—and made my way to my bedroom in the Magdalen Tower fifty yards away. There I retrieved my camera and returned to capture the relic on film.

T
he scene: a mother and eight-year-old daughter at a restaurant.

Peering earnestly at the waitress, the girl says, “I want a hot dog, french fries, and Coke.”

The mother doesn’t acknowledge this declaration. “My daughter will have the bean salad, plain yogurt, and grapefruit juice,” she asserts.

Turning to the girl, the waitress asks, “Do you want ketchup with it?”

The girl beams at the waitress and muses to herself, “She thinks I’m real.”

The moral of the story: Make sure that you hang out as much as possible with people like the waitress.