The Televisionary Oracle (5 page)

Nothing, not even death, scared Jerome more than the threat of losing his connection to his other lives, and so he had risen up with each of Magda’s pregnancies and smote it down. Magda had her own fears—of trying to nurse a baby on a diet bought exclusively with food stamps, of the child becoming sick and her not having the money to care for it, of devoting her attentions to a child Jerome didn’t want, thereby chasing him away so far that he would disappear forever. And Jerome preyed on all those poverty-induced fantasies, manipulated Magda for the good of his magic.

For more than five years, as abortion followed abortion, Jerome nurtured in private his unique conflict. On the one hand, he could never use birth control for fear of extinguishing the idoni that powered his journeys. On the other hand, if he permitted any of the resulting pregnancies to come to term, his journeys would end.

But as I said in the beginning, there was a girl child born to Jerome and Magda. Me, Rapunzel Blavatsky. How did that come about? Why, upon Magda’s and Jerome’s fifth conception, did he withdraw his demands to terminate the pregnancy?

Liberation Day—at least that’s what I call it—arrived during a cool, cloudy spell in the middle of August. Magda had been up since
4
A.M
. cleaning a laundromat, which she did five days a week. Jerome was deep in the woods behind the university campus, coming down from three days of healing the sick with Jesus and company in Galilee. As was often the case when he returned from one of his time travels, he was in a voracious and horny mood. Fantasies of making love to Magda competed in his feathery, aerated organism with an intense longing for French onion soup and grilled salmon and artichokes dipped in mayonnaise. Before he rode his bike to the cafeteria in town where he would scam the food people left behind on their trays, he visited the oak tree where his and Magda’s joint diary resided.

Magda was used to Jerome’s extended absences, and to keep things equal she pulled off her own disappearing acts from time to time. But on this particular day she was horny and voracious herself. Maybe it was the dream that had awoken her minutes before the alarm clock: swinging joyfully on the erect, bouncing phallus of an enormous satyr. Or maybe it was the little twinge she’d felt to the southwest of her navel last night, sure sign that she was ovulating. Riding her one-speed bike to work in the predawn mist, she felt like the Slut of the World; fantasized like a happy lunatic about copulating with rock stars and construction workers and tigers. By the time she was unlocking the double glass doors of the laundromat, the raw sexual craving had softened into a yearning for the kind of empathic listening that Jerome, of all the people she’d ever known, did best. Though there were many days when her husband was as narcissistic as a child, he would regularly slip into a state of grace during which he became the most tender reflector—wildly curious about her life, and full of interesting questions that, when she answered them, made her real to herself.

After work she pedaled straight to the oak tree where the diary lay nestled in a fork of branches some twenty feet up. While perched up there, she read his most recent entry, dated just hours before. It said something like this:

“Ascetic Dionysian with idiot-savant tendencies seeks flexible doll-maker with crafty riffs for experiments in organized chaos. Guzzle my poetry, baby, and I’ll be your disciplined wacko. Trick me with your cunning stunts and I will taste you all over with my forked tongue. Scavenging tonight? Meet me here at 9:03
P.M
. and we’ll go raid the witch’s garden. Wear your costume from 39 in Grimms’.”

What made Jerome’s insanity even more insane was that he was so precise, so punctual, so perfectionist, and not at all in the compulsive way that schizophrenics sometimes have. His exactness was very relaxed. You could be sure that the peculiar time for their date, 9:03, had a baroque numerological import for him, and you also knew that he’d be there not a minute later. Yet he didn’t mind if you were late, and he never harangued you with the cosmology of it all.

Magda was there early, having enjoyed an afternoon nap to compensate for the sleep she’d probably be missing later that night. Thanks to a visit to the Bargain Barn, a used clothing warehouse where clothes sold for twenty cents a pound, she’d assembled “a costume from 39 in Grimms’.” That seemingly cryptic reference in Jerome’s note was no mystery to Magda. She’d known to turn to page 39 in her edition of
Grimms’ Fairy Tales
, where she found the story of Rapunzel. What it all meant, she knew, was that Jerome was enlisting her, as he had on numerous occasions, in another one of his “mythic reconnaissance missions” in preparation for an attempt at “mutating the old imprints.”

Jerome was a writer of fairy tales. He was convinced, in fact, that his stories were to be his greatest gift to humanity. He wasn’t so intent, though, on creating new myths from scratch as he was of messing with the old standards. Long before the word “deconstructionism” became a shibboleth for academic elites, Jerome used it to describe his modus operandi. If traditional stories and myths were records of the outdated patterns that characterized the collective unconscious long ago, Jerome wanted to be the one who disrupted those moldy patterns and rearranged them into fresh imprints more conducive to creating the utopia that he staunchly believed was humanity’s destiny.

At 9:03 Magda was under the oak tree dressed as a German peasant woman might have dressed in the thirteenth century—if, that is, she’d had access only to the Bargain Barn: long muslin dress over grey leggings, brown suede vest and faux leather work boots. Jerome’s outfit was more authentic: the materials of his shirt and tights were made of extremely rough tan fibers, and his primitively sewn leather boots were a throwback. Where’d he get them? Chances are he’d try to make you believe he’d somehow managed to smuggle them back over the dimensional threshold from fifteenth-century France.

“What if in the new, updated version of Rapunzel,” Jerome said
conspiratorially as he hugged Magda in welcome, “the witch never catches the husband in the act of stealing the lettuce?”

“Then you wouldn’t have much of a story left,” Magda retorted sensibly. “In fact, you might as well say, ‘They all lived happily ever after, the end’ after that.”

“Ah, but wait. Let’s theorize that the witch’s garden represents the mystical knowledge of herbs, the old wise woman lore passed down from mother to daughter since before the beginning of history. And what if in the new version of ‘Rapunzel,’ the husband scales the walls of the witch’s sanctum and brings its delicious secrets back to his wife—again and again. Let’s say the witch, the guardian of the old womanly ways, never stops him. Maybe she never even notices. Or maybe she notices and still decides to let him do it. Maybe she says to herself, if this man is so devoutly in service to his wife’s needs, then I will allow him access to the old wisdom. I will permit him to become mediator between crone and maiden.”

Jerome was a man out of time. The cultural trends of his historical era brushed up against him, but his dearest passions were fed by the madnesses and fetishes of other eras and places. He was also, in a curious sense, a man of action. It was true that when he was in his learning mode he could close his eyes in broad daylight and remain virtually motionless for hours while he traveled hundreds of years and thousands of miles away. But when he was in his creative mode, working on one of his mutated fairy tales, he needed to create rituals in
this
time and this place. Maybe it was the Aeschylus in him—he believed that in another incarnation he was the ancient Greek playwright—that compelled him to dramatize his ideas in order to explore them. There was something about physically recreating the conditions of the story he was deconstructing that aroused buried reserves of inspiration.

A half hour later, after pedaling their beat-up bikes a couple miles to the spot Jerome had selected for his “mythic reconnaissance mission,” the two crouched at the foot of a stone wall that surrounded a garden and a cottage with one light on. Jerome motioned for Magda to hop on his back and peer over the wall. After she did, he eased her down.

“You know what to say, wife,” Jerome whispered.

“Oh husband,” Magda said without hesitation, “In that garden is a bed of ripe rapunzel greens. They look so fresh and delicious that my mouth is watering. I simply must have some to eat. I think I shall die if I don’t.”

“I cannot let my wife die of longing,” Jerome said. “I will bring you some of that rapunzel, no matter what the cost.”

He clambered up over the wall. In a few minutes he returned with a wad of freshly picked spinach. Magda wolfed it down and lay her head in Jerome’s lap. After a few minutes of silence, she spoke.

“Oh husband, I cannot stop thinking of that rapunzel. It was so good, so very good, that my craving for it has grown. Please, I beg you, fetch me some more.”

Jerome paid a second visit to the garden and brought back another handful of spinach. Again, Magda gorged herself. But minutes later, her yearning returned yet again. “I am famished for rapunzel, my love. It seems the more I eat, the more I want. Don’t make me wait.”

Jerome leaped over the wall again, and this time, instead of slinking and skulking, he stood up, faced the cottage, and waved his arms. Did a jig. Sang an excerpt of the Hallelujah Chorus. And then snitched some spinach and returned to Magda. This time she only pretended to eat. The fairy tale wife might still be fascinated with the taste of rapunzel, but the actress needed a break from the spinach. The green leaves got stuffed in the waistband of her leggings.

“Husband,” she said as she massaged his shoulders and neck, “My hunger for rapunzel has become so wild that I can no longer contain it. I beg you now to become hungry for rapunzel yourself. For only if you eat the rapunzel until it is gone can my own hunger ever be satisfied.”

Jerome pulled his wife’s long dress up above her waist and kissed her just below her navel. Then he heaved himself over the garden wall. Taking a small notepad and pen out of his pocket, he wrote the following: “Dear Witch: Thank you for helping us to change history. With your gracious permission, I have fetched my wife so much of your rapunzel that I, too, have become hungry for it. Now there is no longer any need to protect my daughter from me, for I have renounced the ignorance of my gender and the sins of the fathers. With deep reverence, Rapunzel’s Daddy.”

Jerome strode up to the cottage and slid the note under the back
door. Returning to the garden, he plucked the remaining spinach and carried it back to where Magda lay. Slowly and methodically, he chewed and swallowed it all.

“Shall we consecrate the mutation, wife?” he said. Licking her forehead once, he removed her vest, pulled her dress over her head, undid her boots, and shimmied off her leggings. Then he lay back passively while she performed the same ritual on him. As she finished and lay down next to him, he said, “Nope. Got to give our love to the promised land. Come on.”

He urged her over the garden wall. Once there, she took his hand and led him to the pumpkin patch. Under the scarecrow, he sat on the soft, damp night earth and she settled down on his lap. There for the next how many minutes—the time it took for the two-days-past-full moon to slither from behind the hill yonder to the top branch of the apple tree in the garden—they did the eye-fucking game. Tip of lingam lightly poised against tip of clitoris, no penetration except their amused and hallucinating eyes, slinging dusky amber light back and forth, fantasizing daimons and elemental spirits flowing from each other’s nerves, wishing nothing else but that this moment be what it was.

By the time the moon reached the lowest leafy cloud, lingam and yoni had begun to blend, no official moment of entry but only a slow misty merger of yoni electrons and lingam electrons. In this happy-birthday-for-all-sentient-beings, the mask of Jerome’s face glowed transparent for Magda, overflowing with a fountain of momentary portraits—of Aeschylus, perhaps, and Jesus’ brother James, and Jack of Beanstalk fame; but also every man that had ever motivated Magda—that brush-cut warlock with the broken nose who taught her yoga, the fourth-grade teacher who told her she was a good artist, the smart boy she loved in second grade, the face of Jesus in the painting on her
Child’s Book of the Bible
, the doctor who caught her as she pulsed free of her mother’s yoni, her brother, her father.

Never any pressure to “fuck” or “screw” with Magda and Jerome. The mingling, not the friction, was the Grail. If alchemy meant anything, it meant this cooking, this slow, simmering mesh of
why
and
how
. As Magda steamed and marinated his prima materia, Jerome found leopards in her face, quetzalcoatls, the Queen of the Faeries, his mother and grandmothers, his old girlfriend, Billie Holiday, the woman who
had served him ice cream every day of the summer of his ninth year.

And then … who was that last face? He lifted his trance eyes away to find the moon, then looked back. It was still there, shimmering like all the others, but more solid.

Mary Magdalen. The wife of his brother Jesus. A face—unlike the others that were coruscating through his wife-goddess’ eyes—that he felt himself retreat from. Not from lack of love, but from absence of gnosis—as if he weren’t old enough, or smart enough. He wanted to love her, but didn’t know how. As James, he had always felt shy and strongly drawn to her. Taboo.

He felt an infinitesimal gush in his lingam: a small, partial ejaculation—a safety-valve release which he, as a conscientious tantric lover, had trained himself to have so as to avoid a shoot-the-whole-wad explosion.

Feeling the need to anchor himself, to come down a little, he lifted his hands from where they’d been resting on Magda’s hips and brought them to her face.

“Magda,” he croaked, his voice rusty.

“Magdalen,” she replied.

“Magdalen?” he whispered.

“Jesus has changed his mind,” she spoke softly but firmly. It wasn’t exactly Magda’s voice. Huskier even than her usual sex voice.