The Televisionary Oracle (31 page)

“For one thing, I am simply not allowed to reel off the story of your life so glibly,” Madame Blavatsky said. “Though I can confirm once and for all that you were Mary Magdalen. Or rather you were and are and will always be Mary Magdalen. The past and the present and the future all happen simultaneously, you know.

“But for another thing, I have not actually been here with you for the duration. I arrived almost six hundred eleven thousand years after you. That is when you decided you needed a kind of secretary. Someone to remind you of your appointments—especially during your experiments with squeezing your vast primordial self into tiny little bodies.”

“So I created you out of clay and my magic breath?” I said. “Or I had a romantic liaison with the sun and you were our baby?”

“No, ma’am. I was the very first offspring that popped out of what I currently refer to as the
Televisionary Oracle
. An ingenious creation of yours. Best thing you ever made. Though of course you did not call it by such a melodious term back then.”

“Since that was before there was any such thing as human speech, right? So I must have given it a name that sounded like a waterfall or thunderstorm?”

“Its name in the beginning had a pronunciation similar to the sound of lightning striking a tree.”

“So this thing you were born out of, grandma—what you’re calling a Televisionary Oracle—what exactly was it, or is it? Does it still exist today?”

“Sorry, my dear forgetful one. Cannot yet describe it in a way you could intellectually fathom. The synapses you took on when you slipped into your all-too-human body do not yet have the spunk to even perceive it. You keep hustling up more meditation skills, though, and that will change. Eventually you will get linked back to your sixty-six-million-year-old brain. I promise. And I will be here for you when you are ready for that phase.”

“How about giving a few hints.”

“I can tell you that the Televisionary Oracle is a most excellent tool for expediting entry into the Drivetime—a kind of sacred machine for shamanic questers. In fact, it is how you got here today. Other than that I am afraid I cannot say much more just yet. I apologize. But it is your express directions, you know. Before you shrunk down out of your heavenly haunts and squeezed yourself into that tiny sack of flesh you are now stuck inside, you told me not to distract you with cosmologies and eschatologies. ‘Keep me pinned to the details,’ you said. ‘Make me focus on the practical things.’ ”

“Such as?”

“Such as
what exactly are you doing to kill the apocalypse
?”

I had become aware of an emotion coalescing in the space between my heart and throat. It seemed to have been triggered by Madame Blavatsky’s image of me “squeezing myself into the tiny sack of flesh I was now stuck inside.” This was an unfamiliar psychic state, like what desperate longing would feel like if desperate longing were a good and happy thing. I was aghast yet pleased to tune into it. Was this what it felt like to be in love but denied the one you were in love with?

At the heart of this curiously comforting desolation was the ghost of a memory from when I was very young. It must have been from around the time I first started to talk, maybe about nine to ten months old. I recalled—for the first time ever—being in bed with my biological mother Magda.

We were alone together. The only two bodies that had ever existed. One body, really. Swooning and playing, rubbing and cooing, afloat under the gauzy purple blankets. I was tiny and helpless and hungry. She was hot and huge and soft and omnipotent. My mouth was our eternal link, stuffed full of her juicy fat breast. Sweet warm milk trickled forever down into my joy. Silver ocean of her voice drowned me every second. Smoky damp cave of her smell rescued me.

At some random moment in eternity, I paused in my gentle persistent sucking, partly to take a deep breath, but mostly to interrupt the calm joy of the flowing milk so I could incite once again the sharp ecstasy of it bursting afresh into my body. But wait. What was this? As I sighed and shivered, my whole self fluttering in anticipation of
the renewed miracle, her giant hand repelled me. “Last time, sweetie,” she singsonged sorrowfully but sternly. “No more. No more. Drink from bottle from now on. No more nursing. Time to grow up.” And then she guided my confused mouth back to her enormous pulsing nipple. “Last time, baby. No more after this. Last time.”

I may not have understood the words, but I felt the vibe with all my being. I realized exactly what was going on. Exile was looming. Separation and banishment. Grief and panic. Helplessness and pandemonium. She was trying to kick me out of the silken oceanic nest. Rip away the umbilical link for the second and final time.

Adrenaline shot through me. Acetylcholine surged through my synapses. At the core of my foggy bliss, the hard bright glimmering of a primal vow germinated. Was this the birth of my ambition? I felt then that everything I was, everything I would ever be, everything I would ever desire, must be devoted to avoiding exile from Her, the Great Goddess. I would learn every trick, discover every secret, penetrate every mystery, in order to preserve the picture of my angel feather love wriggling in her moist edible fire. I would learn to fly free outside of time and tell her a million stories about her beautiful self.

In the aftermath of that vow, my budding little ego, shocked awake by the threat of exile, mastered every nuance of the Great Goddess’ needs. Part-telepathic adept, part-perceptive genius, I studied every one of Her smells, every gesture, every tone of voice, until I could predict precisely what feeling was coursing through Her and what response I should launch to make Her feel mirrored and loved and thoroughly delighted.

Whatever skills erupted full-grown in me during that moment of crisis, they proved immediately effective. She retreated from Her threat to cut off my supply of elixir. Not until I was taken from her by the bird-woman, Vimala, some months later, did exile finally claim me. But by then it was too late: My WHO AM I? had been imprinted with WHAT DOES THE GREAT GODDESS NEED?

To remember my atavistic desire was rapturous. Never before had I had a first-hand recollection of my early life with Magda. Vimala had told me a few stingy stories, and between the time I was eight and eleven I had had two brief and awkward meetings with Magda, but
this was different. To be so much in love, to be in a trance of delight with the woman in whose body I had first come to Earth, was the recovery of lost treasure. A return to a paradise I’d forgotten I lost.

But as I fermented in this blissful recollection, it gradually gave way to melancholy, and then to anger. Without noticing the exact moment I passed the threshold, I found myself courting hysteria. I became obsessed with how Vimala had never told me I was adopted until I was eight years old. I fumed at how begrudging she had been about telling me the details of my first eighteen months of life. Where had I lived? What were my biological mother and father like? What was the full story of my separation from them?

My rage expanded as I thought of how it had taken Vimala even longer to inform me that I had had a twin brother who died in childbirth, and how unimportant she seemed to regard this crucial fact. I reeled as I thought of how grossly she and my other mothers had always underplayed my heart surgery, as if it were a minor detail that was irrelevant to the project of engineering me into their little avatar puppet.

Worst of all, none of these traumas had ever been formally mourned, let alone acknowledged with alacrity and grace. Many far more minor events in my over-organized life had been accorded the honor of a ritual, but not the loss of my brother, my birth parents, and my natural heart.

“Hello? Is anybody home? Have you been possessed by the spirit of Helen Keller?” Madame Blavatsky was calling through the haze of my reverie.

“I’m too upset to kill the apocalypse,” I said finally. “Right now I’m blinded by self-pity. All I can think about is how big a backlog of grief I have in me. And how angry I am at my supposed loved ones for never helping me unload it.”

“On the contrary,” said Madame Blavatsky. “You are killing the apocalypse even as we speak.”

“No I’m not. I’m just a festering pool of narcissism.”

“I am telling you, Excellency, that you cannot kill the apocalypse way out there until you kill the apocalypse way in here.” She had her hand over her heart. “And you cannot kill the apocalypse way in here until you lovingly explode all the influences—both the terrible, demonic
ones and the nice, loving ones—that would prevent you from making death your ally.”

My heart had begun to rumble and careen again, as it had back in Dr. Elfland’s office. Was I on the verge of a heart attack? Had the surgical correction I’d undergone as a baby begun to fail after all these years? Adrenaline pulsed through me, either because there was a real problem or because of my fear that there was a problem. And yet as terrified as I was, a weird hopefulness welled up too. I could not help but entertain the irrational fantasy that my heart was shedding its unnecessary psychic armor; that I was blasting away the repressed emotions that had inhibited me from becoming myself.

“How do I lovingly explode my mothers’ influences?” I asked in a whisper. “What does that mean?”

“First, feel the crash-awful feelings they muddled up in you. Drink them all the way down to the bitter bottom. Do not explain to yourself so wearily wise why you should not have the feelings, or complain to yourself about how you wish you would not feel them. Do not be consumed with the urge to blame or a desire for revenge. And do not, for Goddess’ sake, bat around grandiose theories about how you came to be possessed by them in the first place. Simply marinate yourself in the stinging, sludge-like pain—the grief, the anger, the nausea, the helplessness. Allow it all to flood through you in all its hideous splendor. Let the feelings move you to lurch and gnash and writhe and twist for a good long while. At least until you realize there is no longer any need for you to pretend to be in control.

“The second thing you should do, Ms. Avatar Puppet, is
feel grateful
for having been given the feelings. And it is not enough just to
say
thank you. Find a way to sincerely feel your bravest, hungriest appreciation. It was the violations your mothers inflicted on you, you know, which are secretly responsible for you being here today, in quest of your true, love-it-to-death calling.”

Slowly at first, then with increasing momentum, I was invaded by a perplexing riptide of diametrically opposed emotions. One strain in the weave was the same effusion of unconditional love that I had felt back in Dr. Elfland’s office following my surgery. I overflowed with a wild longing to express my love for everyone I had ever met. Starting with my mothers’ images, hundreds of faces streamed through my
mind’s eye, as in the instantaneous life review that supposedly flashes through the imagination of a person who’s about to die suddenly.

It was as if the human body has, in addition to the drive for food, sleep, and sex, an instinctive but dormant need to bestow blessings, and I had turned on that primal reflex.

That was but one side of my conflicting mix of feelings. Just as strong as the pangs of fierce generosity was my howling incredulity at how terribly I had been wronged. I was on the verge of sobbing as I contemplated the sickening unfairness of being cast in the role of both treasured savior and hapless puppet. What an oppressive conundrum! I hated all those responsible for conjuring it—my mothers, mostly, but also everyone in the history of the world who had forged the tragic matrix that gave my mothers no other choice but to damage me as they did.

Neither of the two contrary uproars was more true or intense than the other. They coexisted in perfect balance, comprising a bounteous unity. I was a beatific saint and a growling monster.
Crucified
. Caught once again in the clutch of sublime torture.

Only the inbetween is real
.

I did not wail. Nor did I cry or moan. Instead, I relaxed and giggled. I stretched my arms and legs out as far as they would go and I tuned into the curious inwardly spiral motion of the hot flashes in my belly. And then I gave in to a surge of shocking gratitude.

Thank you
, I reverberated as I thought of my mothers’ crimes against me.
Thank you
for forcing me to menstruate against my will, and for your confused and overwrought interpretations of the prophecies about me, because in this way you motivated me to discover the beautiful strategy of self-abduction.
Thank you
for refusing to help me erase my birthmark, because that forced me to seek the adventures and revelations I am enjoying now.
Thank you
for keeping so many important secrets from me, because that will spur me to be ruthlessly honest. And
thank you
for inspiring me to hate you, because it’s through that hatred that I can understand in the most visceral way how everyone on the planet cultures a little apocalypse inside himself.

Madame Blavatsky had lifted her giant bottom off the throne and was now waddling down the runway towards the grotto.

“Follow me,” she called out. “Not to Christ’s Last Supper. But to Magdalen’s First Supper.”

I was hesitant to leave my ruminations—they were so sensually pleasurable—but I trod after her. Once through the mouth of the cave, we crouched down and skulked through a claustrophobic hallway. In a moment we arrived at a door that looked familiar, though I could not at first place it in my memory.

Once inside, I felt an even stronger rush of recognition, though my rational mind said I couldn’t possibly have been here before. Madame Blavatsky had brought me into a run-down, matchbox-sized suburban apartment. The vomit-green shag carpet was ragged and filthy. The furniture was an ugly mix of dilapidated wood and scratched-up plastic. On the plasterboard walls were hung amateurish acrylic paintings of scenes from fairy tales, including “The Devil with Three Golden Hairs,” “The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About the Shivers,” and “Rapunzel.”

A playpen with a few broken toys was crammed into the tiny living room next to an old-fashioned television that was showing an animated cutaway view of the female reproductive system. A vacuum cleaner stood in the hallway to the bedroom. On the floor next to it was the bag of dust and dirt from inside the machine. There was a rip in it, allowing its contents to spill out.