Memoirs of a Mediocre Messiah, Vol. 3 (Director's Glut)

TRIBULATIONS!

Apr 17, 2025

A drawing by Piranesi of a fantastical crossroads stuffed with monumental works of art and architecture, overload by colorful psychedelic letters that say "ALMOST" — *ALMOST: Memoirs of a Mediocre Messiah*

25 – CONQUEROR ABOVE THE SEA OF FOG

Reader, I want you to look in my eyes. I want you to witness me unbuttoned, airily recumbent on a beanbag atop my stylite’s post over the world, nipping on a bright drink with four umbrellalettes. While we’ve noshed on synesthetic popcorn, jacuzzily immersed in the long slow intricate cinema of my silly syllabub soul, my ropy mustache has doubled in size, its gilded twin handlebars swelling up silky and thick and re-emitting the golden glow of my liquid language, becoming glossy as an ecstatic commercial for a breakthrough shampoo, and effortlessly commanding your peepers’ attentions—that is, whenever you’re not ogling the sleek traverse of my mountainous pec rippling through the artfully shifting apertures of my terrycloth bathrobe, or my vastly oversized hypersensual lips, my voluptuous lips sulcate like seashells conching in unconscious air kisses. Fact of the matter is, at times your own lips have quivered in unwitting response as you mumbled, staring at me and shaking your head and always saying the same thing, two syllables you pushed out in spontaneous bliss, not even really needing me to hear: “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” you have whispered reverently, your brainwaves a spiritograph of extemporaneous madrigals.

But O, Exquisite Reader! O Paragon of Perspicacity, Esurient Étoile of Exegesis, and Inebriable Dean of Disinvoltura—I want to thank you! Merci beaucoup! Just between you and me and no one else, I count myself just so lucky that you tripped out and spent all this precious time with me listening raptly to my past. Thank you so, so much for holding my handsies as I tearfully recounted my alienation from the primeval binary of my parents, as I delved like a pain-nosed mole into the subterranean realms of my putrefying wounds. Tonight has been positively therapeutic, resolutory, with miles and miles of milestones; I chased breakthroughs, incised éclaircissements, and disintricated knitted complexes of emotional knots, yet however but I would gotten nowhere without the narcotic of your need for me, the sedative of your presence. I hope you know you’re the best, my friend: you’re special, and extra-valid, and everybody loves you without exception, and anybody who claims to dislike you is wrong and prolly just jealous. You are a legend, a model of legerity and mansuetude, and the only nearly perfect person I have ever met; and humanity has apogeed in your person.—Sincerely, Stefan. :)

Nevertheless hey, look around: here is the world: the night is a tunnel with day at either end, to the far east the sky wears a soft fuzzy blue mustache, while below us a storm’s rim curves through the streets and plays automatic lights like piano keys: see the future rumbling toward us at the speed of the sun. This is reality, with all its timed space and spaced time, and you cannot protect me from it. You may be amazing, but you’re not the messiah. You can’t heal me. You can’t save me from what already happened. There is no cure but death.

So ditch me and hurl your hopes into a higher hero! It’s too late for me! Too late to change! Too late to bridge my filial rifts! Too late—for I no longer want to. Sure, fine, after our family member’s funeral, at 31, I may have neared my ma and listened close and begun to entwine the embroglios of my early life into the epicheiremaic movie of these words… but I had long since embraced solitude and turned into another, the other with no mother. As a baby I had evicted my ma from my heart, which meant that I grew into myself by twisting facefirst away from her through the tinseled intestines of solo pain, pushed along by the peristalsis of the days, face to face with the loneliness of fate. All the mournings in the world would not be enough to put us back together again.

All the same, my mom provided the base for the wailing cake of myself—quibbly jelly with its pink sugar all burnt—and her bequests to me would comprise much of my personality: the gilt worshipfulness, the annealed mistrust in the motives of others, the paranoid inlay of self-immolating flames of felt inferiority, the mothlike lust to flap at the black sun of death, the wistful wisteria of imaginative fertility that flowered best in quiet, withdrawn places. Even today, the ziggurat-city of my adult mind, host to a million riffs of light, rests upon this maternal platform of fear, hope, rush, rapture, disaster. Thanks to her, I would be overheated, desperate, grateful to the cusp of tears. Epiphanized I would rise unwisely and later fall headfirst into the ditch of my bed, finished off by the coming of night. I would talk to you as if you hated me. I would search for secrets in sunbeams. I would play both prosecutor and defense in front of a judge unseen. I would approach the world on my knees, hands cupping my latest dream, not so subtly badgering you for your blessing, eager both to redeem and to blaspheme. Truly truly truly, woe is mom!

But also: woe is dad! When he yelled at us he glazed his image in my mind into a stained-glass portrait of mocking wrath, forever and everafter a bloodhungry joker-angel brandishing the freezing sword of annihilation. Scowling he drove me from safety, exiled me wailing to the outer wastes—yet somehow I didn’t blame him for it. I didn’t blame anybody. I rated his rage as an act of nature. In fact, his baneful expulsion of me into the badlands of dadlessness only stropped my need, sharpened his charm. He may have shut me out with a bang, but his attention, his regard was so hard to win and so easy to lose, his presence so seldom and so sapid, that instead of rejecting him or resisting I had to content myself scraping by on the few spicy scraps he dropped, thankful for every sacred second he spilled on me. I was always on the backfoot, in a dearth of dad; and it led to me treating him far better than I ever treated my mom…

Not that I knew this before now…

Not that I’d ever been honest with myself, before this many-cocktailed night atop the glamorous heights of my palatial inferiority complex…

Ooh, in the throes of this abreaction, I think I might even produce an actual teardrop (uuf!), as I remember the grievous decision I reached, as a shouted-at baby, on that fatal, fateful day. Thrust from the heroic bronze of my father’s light into the greasy grey of a slaughtered landscape, into the runover carcass of the dysenteric world, I did the same as any man would: I reached a simple, practical conclusion: that I did not really need my father so very much, after all. Who needed a father? Weaker babies! Ha ha!

Inspired by my da’s example, and the far-off memory of a Czech angel, I had found a new cope, in which I ran not hot but cold. Birth of a supervillain!

You think I’m joking.

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Further apart than ever, my mom and I thus had totally different crises in the hours after their historic fight, that apocalyptic curbside showdown which formed such a vicious archway into the coming era of terror and error.

My mother—she struggled upstairs, sat against the bed and died and died and died. Ruptured, her beaky head tilted way back, she wept all her water, lymph, blood and milk in fluidfalls that poured down like Van Eyckian silks, crumpled across parquet, rippled out the windows and billowed up to enroll in clouds and shower over oceans, her horrorful sorrow the sorrowing horror of the universe itself while her expletive-shredded body flattened and wrinkled, constringing like a stewed fig sucked of its ambrosial syrup soul.

But I—I could not stand her puddling. It was melodramatic and eardrum-piercing. It was a cliché no less brackish for being utterly trite. What did all this blubbing help? How irritating, how idiotic! I knew I had chosen a far superior path, roaring up the internal road toward angry self-defense and mental auto-liberation. Forget feeble female flailing, for I had learned from my father to stay cool and fight hot, to enshell my soul and race out in blazes of glory. This was my inheritance: the knowledge that no one would help me but myself.

And it was high time I did, partner, for the weeping wardeness had forgotten to put up the baby gate. As I crawled past my mom’s splayed sneakers, she had her face hearsed in her hands, and her brain was being cremated by feelings I saw as foolhardy and futile and girlishly sentimental. All at once I sensed the brobdingnagian gap between our rather differsome intellectual capabilities, and how malapropos it was that she controlled me. By now a full and fractious year had passed since my traumatic birth incident, and (as you have probably noticed) I was bit by bit regaining my unnatural capacities, evolving back into a strange misshapen higher creature far more complex than any ol’ run-of-the-mill baby. Thus, in creeping away from her, I felt I was staking out only what was mine by birthright, and I felt no guilt, not even sadness anymore, only triumph and a painful jubilation, a cutting and electric elation as I passed through that cesspool of disasters toward the open door, that blank checkbook of promises which mirrored in its gloss-enchanted realms the rest of my life.

Exulting darkly, I bumped assfirst down the stairs, descending on a diaper dinghy toward a faerie forest of fantastical furniture, a jungle of pleasures usually off-limits to child prisoners. My mother’s sobs floated around the corner and drenched me, but I just skewed my escaped-con’s eyes at the horizon and forged on toward my secret heaven, deserting my family with such glee, such decisive finality that in the future I would refer to them not as mom and dad but Anke and Marty. And let those titles remain their designations for the rest of this text! From now on, we were apart. From now on, I was alone.

I was alone!!! Wahoo! I had never been happier! At the landing I huffed, beat my brow thrice with my palm, and plunged headfirst into the tremblant utopia of ornate movables, into my wonderful new life abroad. Scooting through cherrywood alcoves, subtending salmon palaces of smoky cedar, glissading down moraines of walnut, I found I did not miss Marty in the slightest, much less cranky old Anke. I spotted pixies, shook paws with bears and lions, sipped punch with undines, manatees, hippopotami; I bartered with natives—and shot a few too, masculated by cold cope into a model mutant frontiersman, a heteroclite pioneer thrown back on my own resources for survival, bent on creating my own destiny unburdened by anyone weaker. I would no longer participate in my parents’ wars, their manipulations, their squalling and squeaming and suffering; all that was over; I was free; and freedom felt so beautiful. My new life, centered on my primal needs for food and for beauty, would be all passion and romance, adventure and overlargeness. It would be immense.

In my elation I scaled a mahogany mountain range, where a mistral whipped my blond cilia about my paramecian ears. My pelt pelisse billowing out behind me, I shook the tumorous lump of my fist over leagues of fog, in my bejeweled hubris defying the universe that contained me.

The universe replied instantly. It sent a scissor-sharp yowl of headwind, which made me stumble back and fall into the treacherous canyon of unearthly creations. On the way down I smacked my head. Three times. Hard.

26 – HELLCAT AND THE TRIUMPH OF SATAN

While shriveling Anke slowly solidified. In her sunken heart a ruffled hole shuffled, slurping dust as she worked her ribs’ bellow; yet as Marty’s stink slunk off, as her desolation decanted, there trickled into her triangular depths a dangerous new mood, a raw balmy feeling seeping from her spirit’s crannies, a horned and husky heat piping from flues hidden ‘neath her ideals, a sour subrosa swelter that convected under her shrunken-balloon skin and inflated her into brimming tautness. It was—it was… anger! It was virtuous fury, an ardent, profound, and radiant ire that perfused her organs in lieu of the sad fluids she’d lost, redly rose to her ears and eyes and rinsed her senses and dyed her usual ways of hearing and seeing until suddenly the heraldic lion that was Marty in her mind flipped colors and lights and directions, transformed by the anamorphic metachromasia of her rage. From his slow smile in profile hatched a sinister snide, and in the veiny eggshell of his pride winnowed the beschrewing wings of a sting-blind scorpion, as the eclosion he was undertaking—his full-mind transmogrification into a solanine meanie—was unclothed and disclosed to Anke, her love’s shimmer-coating fading and dissolving.

Oo, what a petulant petunia! A crotchety cheetah! A chimaeric child! Augh, his jackal-eyed, bloody-snouted urge to hurt! Those eyeteeth rending, those plosives exploding and fricatives fricasseeing! What poison! Hate! Acid efflux! With no further bother she could toss all he’d said in the trash, just forget his obtuse and ridiculous rant full of factoids he’d invented, because Marty was so obviously anything but wise and enlightened, didn’t know nothing about nothing, was just thrashing and lashing out in fiddly fi-fo-fuming confusion, was a sad and wilted solipsist too introrse to crack his eye-husks and observe the holy light that nourished his growth. Would that deaf-blind dumb-dumb ever thank anyone for the personal gift of existence that ought to astonish and humble him hourly? Was he even capable of considering the really rather quotidianly sensible and straightforward idea that everything was here for a reason? Else why was anything here at all, huh? Should the All have arisen out of Nothing? NO! Everything had a meaning which it was supremely important to decipher as soon as humanly possible, in order to make oneself right with the Cosmic Judge Who Had Created The Universe—was that so hard to understand?[1] And even if he didn’t agree, why be so mean, mean, mean???

If anything he had pushed her closer to God! HAH! What a jerk! What a joke! What a jackoff!

…Y’ever blench when reality hits? Well, Anke blanched even when it feinted, and right now her demeanor wiggled and went wavy with trepidation as a long howl charged sparking down her earholes—no, not the call of her blessèd babe, but the yowling tocsin of catkind. She vaguely looked toward the loggia… only to double-take as she realized that I was nowhere to be seen.

Breathing like a steam train, Anke found me seated under a mock reliquary, four birdies flapping around my head and tweeting, my eyes fanning wide and my lil tongue flopping out. Despite her anxiety, which usually panicked me, I was wearing a big, sloppy, crooked smile. Drooling profusely I stretched out my hands, my t-shirt already spattered with saliva, and there followed a tearful if somewhat damp reunion which might have saved our relationship had she not heard once more the scowling mrawl of the Chekhovian cat from Nowonderland. That baneful, saber-clawed, G.I. savage was nearly speaking human, so clear was he in his insistence that she was dutybound to release him though all he craved was a saturnalia of annihilation, to slice her into sushi and mutilate her baby. Yet she couldn’t just leave the poor brute cooped up. Turn your cheek, Jesus had commanded, even if a cat scratches the other side. Hefting me to her chest, she shuffled through the unlivable living room, edged around a pentahedral dresser, and peered through the sunroom’s glass portal.

Marty had left open the dormer window, and on its sill sat enthroned the omega monarch of Russian Longhairs, the warlock king C. Tiger orangely aureoled in flaring fur, shaking off heat like a launching rocket, his classically gorgeous feline visage both bestial and celestial, elite and primeval. To my broken mind he seemed no cat but something far more powerful, with devilish designs all his own. He was a manifestation, a myth taken flesh and given will, a theriomorphic demon-divinity scorching the window’s scuncheons and wobbling air with his wicked warmth, his whiskers sizzling, tail pluming at attention, illegible emerald eyes roiling with the inner monologue of an alien antagonist. Kyphotically inclined over the sloping roof, gleering like a gargoylish Abaddon atop a bolgia, he surveyed the wider world that was awaiting with held breath his cataclysmic entrance. Anke tipped open the door most gingerly. “Please don’t,” she whimpered in conciliatory humility, bending her body as one big knee to that fearsome firecat who might well gouge her jugular as his overdue tribute, or as his initiatory ceremonial sacrifice for the enuclear coming of the Antichrist: see his seven-fanged maw slopping with abominations and the impurities of the fornications he was intending to commit.

Flicking his flaming tailwhip, the Flagitious Tsar of the Psycho Inferno turned upon me his hard and gemlike glare. As his pupils morphed from fusiform to hourglass to lozenge, his Neronian eyes bore into mine, stab-glaring in a way that left puncture smudges. I just drooled at him petulantly, too bonked to be scared of this supernatural caricature. All around him cavorted flamelets, peardrops of fire that grew legs and tumbled around giggling insanely at double speed though the red beast himself no longer moved in the smooth gradations of real time but rather shifted dissolving between stillnesses, each posture remaining momently then melting into a renewed position, as if the world lagged in transmitting his movements. Herking and jerking, trailing fading versions of himself, he snapped back his snout, gaped his punctate chomper, and pronounced one last logosless accusation against us in a bending wendigo yowl, a corrugated exclamation strike that threshed Anke three steps back crying out. Snrk snrk, he tutted, then turned and slipped out. She lunged forward just in time to witness his leap from the roof’s near edge. His fire-flared form hung suspended, guttering ultrared with extraplanar holocaust roaring through him, while the sun went black, the moon shuddered with blood, and a trio of starlings fell from the sky and imploded in puffs. Shortly the antimatter cat re-appeared on the road sprinting to a parked jeep under which he batted at some tiny creature, Chief Tiger having always had the most unerring ability to find small and vulnerable lifeforms he could bully-bitch and burke.

I had clutched my cheeks but couldn’t scream. The whole world was red. Red, red, red. My head fell off, and out grew an even uglier replacement head.

Anke didn’t budge, staring down at the slinking splash of carroty flame. Let that abomination go! Good riddance! He hated living with her anyway, and now he could play Big Papa Death out there and murder all the livelong day. Never, EVER come back, she wanted to wail into the world, wishing on the terrible tom such mortal miseries as would stump any budding theodicean.

But of course, if she didn’t pursue Chief T., that is if she didn’t chase a fanged brawler who would ken her rescue as a kidnap and defend himself accordingly, that is if she didn’t risk for a cat her own possible forcible disembodiment at the muggerly hands of the hobo-haunted city, then Marty would never, never forgive her. Nooo, he’d be enraged beyond reason, would gunk her brain with the gung-ho bile he gobbed, would persecute, barrage and boulder her and mulishly refuse to understand why she might have wanted to allow a homicidal luciferiline to escape. Marty’d let that furry murder imp maul Stefsie before he ever hammered a cross into its jaguarundi heart—and maybe not even then.

Her arms tiring, she shifted my deadening weight. I seemed to be nodding out… Heck, look how Marty had mistreated her! What in heaven did she owe HIM?? Nothing!! Not a single measly dollar of devotion! Really—she could just lie!!! LIE!!!! Tell him it was ultimately his fault (true!) and that the cutty cat had evaporated from the sunroom unseen (almost true!). And reader, wasn’t this valedictory lie justified? Marty’s flame gremlin had been the indefatigable fount of her adversity, he had hunted and haunted her. With him eliminated she could resume her charmed and mellifluous douceur de vivre, could stippy-step into hippy-happiness, could sip and sup at an uninterrupted connection with the affable chuckly God whose friendly light my dad had involuntarily fanned and revived by fistly squeezing all the bell air from her hello heart. With cat scattered, she and I would be safe, sanctified, sanctuaried—and who would ever know, she asked herself, that she had lied, belied, deceived and misled???

Well, she would know…

And God would know…

And Marty would be woebegone. He cherished that malefic creature, had purchased it as a kitten to celebrate his discharge and then adventured with it through seven years, three cities and five girlfriends. Late tonight, after discovering its absconding, poor martyred Marty’d probably drive around despite his tiredness and call out disconsolately and yearn, crying his rare, aftershave-fragrant tears. There’d be pain, so much pain, pain that she should not want to cause him. Forget how fiercely and ignorantly he’d larruped her fragile frame of reference—it was nevertheless her loving duty to rise above revenge and fly out and fetch his oldest friend and prize cat. Would she pass this sudden trial, or would she lollygag windowly all day excusing her own petty pusillanimity?

Chief Tiger had eviscerated his sentient plaything and was squinting like some satanic haruspex into its entrails. Once that bleak fortune had been read, he turned, craned his neck and, his opulent flamefur gusting as if blown by invisible hairdryers, met royally the quivering gaze of my distraught ma.

“I hate you,” she whispered onto the wet wind, as the springy spring breeze chucked her chin, tugged her ears, shined her eyes and lit her mind.

I woke from my concussed daze as she was strapping me against her chest. It happened all too fast: before I could voice any complaint, she was locking the front door and running downstairs with the cat cage clanging at every step. Through all the haze I found my pallid version of my dad’s righteousness. How dare she! I croaked and rammed her with my fat forehead, but she pinned me against her shoulder, and all I could do was peep out Kilroyishly behind as if jetting backward down an unfunfair ride, betrayed for the gazillionth time. There was a calamitous cracking creak, a curt burst of city breath, then we crossed the front door’s boundary and ZZZWHOSS: spiky air shivered and shocked my damaged mind with its blossoming electric buzz. For the first time in my mildewed memory, I was invaded and ventilated by that special spring zephyr, that spirituous lukecool gust that energizes everything and plucks your mood cords and sets them vibrating anew, so you feel alive and lively after the somber dress wedding to death that was winter. Sounds groovy, eh? But that bliss missed me. Huddling, I felt myself not bathed but besieged by that buoyant Persephonean energy of change, that giddy force of parturition and pullulation, its fresh favonian feathers flapping up my dust after so many deadened white moth-months inside the becalmed closet of our icebound apartment. Having forgotten the pealing feeling of kantikoying joy, I could only get insliced and inmixed and inviscerated by the spring thrill spearing up through me, only be crunched into migrainish overstimulation as bustling phenomena chuffed like huffling buffalo into my ocular tunnels, as a supernova of novelty blasted away my barriers and with wight light obliterated the watchtowers atop my ego. I twisted and struggled to resist this vernal tide of springtime newness, but never did I realize I could simply accept it. After all, everything new was horrid, I knew. Hazards, harsh potions, and hemoglobin skies were what I had learned to expect from the ungreat outdoors. And who in my bootees could have thought otherwise? I, babble-brained and lost-marbled, may have been no ace of ratiocination, yet in my own way I did recall roughly what’d happened the last time she and I sallied outside. It had been extremely not good. It had incited my Fall from Eden. Gagging on awed and dreadstruck drool, I sniveled and foresaw horror as our once-upon-a-safehouse receded and swerved off into the frothing ether, its mental image remaining like a picturesque vignette.

The crystal illusion of freedom had burst from the brutal blow of the truth. I might have been stupefied, but through my cantering headache, through the rolling thunder of my concussion, I understood my condition like never before. I would never be able to do just what I wanted. There was no escaping my parents: they would ride my shoulders down into my grave. There was no fleeing my fate: I was a prisoner still, and always would be, lashed to the back of the stallion of time, galloping along roads I’d rather never have seen. What now of my stoicism, of my noble detachment, of my neoclassical self-composure? I was frying like a hamburger patty cursed with existential consciousness, leaking bloody grease as I sizzled on the cortisol griddle of my stress, the yolk of my pneuma inspissating, all my cells sighing and signing up for suicide.

27 – THE BEAST IS CAST INTO THE PIT

From the pursed center of C. Tiger’s sumptuous archducal mouth a mousetail dangled like a snake’s tongue. Down on the sidewalk, he seemed larger, statelier, swollen to spaniel size and tigerishly tricepped; his claws could’ve cracked walnut skulls. Anke salaamed and sank to her knees, proffering the cage as if it were a vassalage levy—but the callous future-king just dropped a growl bomb, then skedaddled around the corner and lit off down a rowdy commercial street full of ethnic groceries and bum-frequented bakeries and shark-circled pool halls, in other words a shady congested blightland from which few meek souls ever returned undisfigured and innocent. Hugging me so snugly that she almost incorporated me back into the Mutterleib, Anke peered dolefully after the escaped psychopath, who had sprawled beside a fire hydrant and was keeping watch like a hydraulic totem’s demigodly sentinel. Daring her.

She let herself have a little whine that had a long grey bouquet of despair. Old King Tiger was not worth this—she ought to volte-face and get lost, even if by retreating she was basically begging for an alkaline torrent of abuse from Marty, who would orally assault her with all his self-prescribed pharmacopeial armamentarium of cathartic articulations, since apparently and arrantly he did not give a gilded hoot that she could get hurt, noooo, was altogether untroubled that scared bunnies who dared to poke a toe outside their confines sometimes got that toe smashed. There are no rabbit traps in the rabbit hutch, nor were any drunkards’ cars barreling through her third-floor studio, that hexagonal-jeweled matron’s monastery in the sky—but did Marty care? No!

To this fledgling fighter, anger was potenter than whiskey, more intoxicating than drum and dance, was a turbo jetboost that sent her hurtling over burning bridges toward the ever unlikelier. Continually refilling her fire, anger blasted through her old foe Fear at last and cleared the course for heretofore unachievable achievements. And O.K., maybe anger was a bit demonic. Maybe she was burning. But what if… What if she plunged into peril on purpose? Oh ho! Yes, she would risk her existence for Marty’s prize pet—and for her troubles she might well get gouged, knifed, raped, kidnapped. Isn’t that what he thought she deserved? Maybe he would be relieved if she died! Or let him rage against her in the hospital! Let him cry beside her bed and apologize! She would sacrifice herself, and he would learn the hard way, and! And—!

Her head lifted her off her feet. Narrowing along her sagittal plane, she ellipsed into a single-eyed seer focused laser-lancely on that enormous flamboyant & dire pyrecat. Fire against fire, she tripped forward, wibble-faced as a Schiele, toward yet another unearthly incarnation of iniquity.

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Over Anke’s shoulder the world flowed backward, spray-creating itself in a thudding retroflux of colors, persons, machines, seeming to rip itself into raw being from the filmic essences of my eggoid eyes. I hankered for it to stop, that bibelot-flow of sensations, yet was too stupid to close my eyes though they vomited sights, stung to madness by a self-needling panic reagented from various overreactions, a frenzy which did not exactly bode well for any future prospect I might have had of buccaneerish imperturbability. Yah yah I may have sworn fealty to freedom, pledged myself to the edge—but how much freedom could I feed on, and how much reality could I realize? Every freak, every flower, every fruitfly seemed torn from my core, arted from a part of me that I would never recover. Were I to wander wide enough, I’d void myself, my vantage would blend into the ending landscape, would evaginate into the nulliverse. I was not ready. I would never be ready, neither to be one nor zero.

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Anke was increasingly tearful but too shy to ask passersby for help. She crept along sweating like spoilage, struggling with the clanky cat-cage and sibilating pspsps, hey kitty, kitty-kitty-kitty, I’m begging you, oh help me Lord. King Tiger, who may have assumed he was the Lord being addressed, royally squatted and lick-caressed his flourishy paw, as if to vouchsafe us some last precious time in his presence, but then he curlicued off across several blocks and dainty-toed down an alleyway where the nail-and-washer-strewn pavement was discolored and crinose and continentally dissected, and iron staircases snailed down from elevated factory floors between monolithic walls with only a few tiny windows punched in high up. Above the factories’ knobbled heads, clouds crowded elbowing into a mass-panic sky that had been clear as a sleeping baby’s forehead until like five minutes past. This forming storm had drawn its bulk and brawn from her earlier tears, but now, in some kind of weird faintly Freudian cathexis, the minotaury welkin grumbled personally against her, then stopped its winds and held its breath till it turned indigo-faced, about to throw a tense-taloned tantrum that would surely blot out all sin in one huge deluge of javelin rain. In that gloamish gloom, King Tiger kept glancing back, contemplating her from the fiery center of his puss’s power, puissant and ablaze, looking like a burning effigy of the peaceful mouser he once was. He was big as a bobcat, beefy enough to be ridden yet flowing along with an effortless nimbleness uncanny in a beast his size, as if he weighed nothing, as if he were all pluming fur and no body and only touched the earth at four kris-clawed points because doing so suited his ulterior purposes. And since when had his fur been so satiny, so brushed and immaculate and expensive-looking? It all gave her a headache. A whamming, ramming headache, in her heart.

But she couldn’t stop now, compelled by a hunch of higher importance, a sense that she wasn’t chasing a cat, she was pursuing a meaning, a keying, the plot woven into her world—maybe her destiny? Still, for the sake of lil Stefsie (very heavy by now, but miraculously calm in her arms) she might have run away, might have saved us both by returning whence she came—if only her quisling feet were not betraying her and trotting unfaithfully after Ol’ Scratch himself.

The street seemed to lean away from itself in disgust, all falling brick walls and wrenched brick benches and slashed trashbins leaking viscera of garbage. There were no trees or people, no doors or windows, no road signs or soda lights. Just bricksbricksbricks. The skyless sky, the two-dimensional frontages and the curtailed exits queasy with subtle foreshortenings and foresilhouettes, together resembled a grim theater-set with a knock-off Caligari-Beckett aesthetic which rendered everything as dark brown or light brown, a chiaroscuric visual language that turned even the banal inanimalities of litter into threatening entities, the dim corpses of toxic creatures populating this dying and destroying end where she would surely get stabbed. Neck oxbowed, tongue sore from the clenched beckoning of the cat-summoning heterorganic affricate ps, Anke simply allowed her eyes to plead as she stooped holding out the hated cage, which by now was far too small for its prospective occupant. The lucifugous crimson panther glanced back one last time, snorted as if to say you must only change your request, then prowled around a thorny heap of blood-tipped barbed wire, broke right and charged behind a bollard, and vanished.

While she scooted around the thorny wire, a sound ribboned rainbowishly as an LSD-infused nudibranch into her sensorium. Playful chime-boops gooped like aloe over her million small scalds, the gaily sailing sloop of each note an emotional proof of magic that scudded with lovely melancholy, underscoring my mother’s trot and infusing her with mimeto-rhythmic verve. It was the simulated tinkly-tink of a mild musicbox melody, soft melting sugary bells sweetening the air to the tooty tune of “March Onward Christian Soldiers.” This gloopy music preceded its maker, unrolling its placative electronic monophony in a sucrotic carpet that splashed out and frosted the route for the refrigerated arkish artifact now bumping and jootling past—an ice-cream truck! For her, in that loneliest moment in that wilderness of bricks, this boxy, corporate truck, its square bum humming with the power of cold, piloted by a leonine Jesus lookalike in white who waved gaily, was the most brilliant token of comfort imaginable, a beautiful proof of human existence and of a harmless world of happy children munching icepops, and a hint that heaven was real.

The dust it’d shoved muttered in a gaseous calligraphy of sooty swirls, forming particulate paragraphs addressed to Anke in yet another script she could not recognize. Something both powerful and powerless was battling to reach her, to communicate a message it felt she absolutely needed to know—yet for some reason it could rave at her only in subtle ways could not detect, much less understand. Not till much later would she guess that some unseen entity was trying to save her. Or, possibly, to threaten and mislead her. Anyway, by the time the soot fell silent, King Tiger seemed to have disappeared.

And in a manner of speaking, he had disappeared. The screaming fiend had made his exit, taking along all his flaunty fire and flamboyant fury—but not far from her sneakers he had left a disheveled object in his place, something flattened and bumpy, small and limp and tire-tracked and stiffly ruglike, untraveled by even a twitch, mangled so tangledly she couldn’t even make out where his magnificently handsome head might once have reared. The tomcat had become horrifyingly abstract, stretched into a smear of catness, an impasto collage of vague felinity. In some strange way, he looked as if he had never lived, or only been born as this self-coda of decoupled Jabberwock.

And this transmutation had occurred instantly. Sub the space of a second, Chief Tiger had been converted from singular lifeform to generic dirty meat, not a wink of his essence remained, and any danger he might have represented seemed risible, the overripe nightmare fruit of a hyperventilated hothouse imagination. He may have scraped and hissed, but now he was a depowered victim, his steamrollered pelt nothing but a sample or reminder of the true source of fear, the real Big Daddy Terror incarnate in that red corpse: Death. And Death did not need to chase her or to threaten. Death would win against her without trying, for nobody lived forever, there was no happily ever after, nothing worked out in the long run, and all existers would be destroyed. Death would take her, and Marty, and Stefsie too. And nobody—nothing—no god would save her from this meatness. Marty had been right. Marty had been right all along, and she had never felt anything more rending. It was like being bitten apart by starving lions, like getting broadsided by an ice-cream monster-truck.

Later she looked up wetfaced. She had no idea which way she’d come.

28 – A PROPHET AWAKENS

My head was beating veinlike, under a piledriver of pain like an entire skyscraper dropping on my skull once a second, regular as death.

Over Anke’s shoulder I glimpsed a gorgeous Siamese cat, a female whose almost entirely white pelt contrasted starkly against the burnt black fur of her amatorial face. She winked a blue-howlite eye, then curled away, lofting her sensual tail and receding into reality. As she became an image, I shifted my fracturing attention to a far more impelling sight: a lumpy tread of muddy orangish fur, a jigsaw of absurdist nonsense that reminded me of our quondam tom. His prolapsed eyes stared into mine, then began to grow, popping free from his head, doming up to block the entire street, two perfectly round emerald-hued cat-eyes crunching through infrastructure and bursting through electric wires, while within his green-lantern pupils there unfurled scrolling hallucinations of ominous nonsense. Too scared to scream, I watched fixed and transfixed as a series of my selves unfolded in a peacock-tail shivering, rippling iridescent eye-orbs winking knowingly and looking very sly indeed, my own insidious expressions repeating in the mini-cinema of my nerve ends; I saw my own WAS and WILL BE in the optic flare cupped in the hollow of three hands around a goetic flame containing an image of the First Last Supper; I saw Mohammed Christ’s eyes on fire; I saw the kerygmatic beard of a sepulchral sparkler, golden sphinxes in the sanctum sanctorum, and the brixxly abraxas encapsulating and decapsulating the mysterium tremendum—

IIIIIIIIIIIII!

EEEEEEEEEE!

OOOOOOOOO!

UUUUUUUUU!

AAAAAAAAAAA!

And so the principalities offered praise to the Indescribable Virgin Word! Chesseus Mareus Yeekeus living lexical child of the child glorious name in truth namely eternal being ZTHAXA EE OO UU ZZZAAAZZZ!

A giant sloth claw was gripping my skull. It squeezed and queased, pinching and crunching my neckbones back until cluster bombs exploded in my temples in a dit-dot-dit aphex beat. I was entering a herky-jerky dancescape of death, grinding into the red-velvet tunnel twixt my ears, from whose rustling darkness I was watched by two green cat eyes, eyes assessing me, contemplating me, rushing toward me like demonic headlights down a subchthonic road, though they were also not moving, not approaching, not doing anything but broadcasting a sort of chronic judgment. This judgment, its hinge unclear, could not be appealed, but its sentence would be deferred indefinitely: it would land tomorrow, in a year, in a century. Then the cat eyes closed, and I shriveled down into my puckered burst body, ruddly red as a popped whitehead, just flaps of lippy skin billowing around the scopotoxic pus of my bastard being.

…redwater rapids. Palisades of glass. Cowboy boulevards. Cyberpunk precipices. Mezzanines over ashlar dungeons where gargantuan hooks dangled from gantries, bearing oblong cuts of meat whose balkanized anatomies did not resemble any earthly animal, segmented crystal chines big as rowboats dripping clear blood. A star the size of the sky: a star opening its mouth. Atomic butterflies landing on houses, exploding into blouses of flame, fossilized dawn all brown with flakes of petrified clouds. Certain sights can kill you and leave you living… Her body, which was the universe, and her mind, which was time.

Logos the lego-block of the universe.

Brain-chewing Buddhas sat in emptied eyes and smiled. Lamb-sucking spiders spun on heaping hills of stolen foreskins. Fez-capped skulls hid blue-chip moons under their scorpion-tail tongue bones while flag-bearing millipedes twilled through their oiled orbitals. Two crucifix-cufflinked hands shook each other in spasms in the radical dark of a funeral planet, unleashed plagues of fiduciary flies and numismatic mosquitos—money rained on monasteries, sharp steel crosses sank into striplings’ bellies, and scripture-drunk fathers hardened into the coffins of their daughters. Bishop-mitered seagulls gathered to mourn their dearly departed hotdog, while a thousand-statued temple extruded glistering glyphs whose story-flukes caught in the ears of the underclasses, tugging till the emanations above mirrored those below, till subjugation iterated down through a thousand worlds, and a copper ring cinctured a neck, and a penis imploded, and a dirty knife slit the bud of an ungrown rose.

Two ways lie open. Down one way lies the inspired construction of new cities as the old ones are claimed by waves of heat or water, as Canaan’s earth turns to sand, ribcage fixtures sprouting on outcrops and hilltops. When our populations migrate into the defrosting zones, we can make cities the way they should have been: crannied, erratic, serviced by trains, in a land without cars, where on boulevards different makes of creativity collide. In the smoking distance an ocean spider pulls grillages into jellyfishy water, and out of the stenotic tops of high-rises snarl the silky eyes of the fittest. Amid the ruins we find our splendor, and learn the pleasure of the limit, the deep sense of satisfaction from not having certain needs satisfied or even fed. We do not disappear, but contract sharply, and into the vacated spaces rushes everything we have cut, fenced, slaughtered, mowed, planed, fitted, encaged, bred, trapped, manufactured, manicured and medicated. This is the sunny way, the way of gold, the hard-won victory. Of the other way we will not speak.

Wait, what?

֍֍֍

Death-dazed, Anke abandoned the car carrier beside the carcass as if the cage should provide its coffin. She needed to get home right now, before muggers emerged or the typhoon started or a bridge offered itself as a leaping place. Thankfully, I seemed to have passed out, to have snoozed through this agonizing enterprise and her existential flagellation. Lucky baby! Her back aching from my weight, she trekked back a few streets—or thought she did, but somehow ended up wandering catercorner barricades of notched concrete, in a mouse-grey nonplace which evoked both the end of all cities and the time before any had been finished, as if an eyeless mindless program had generated the nonsensical alleys of this luckless lightless labyrinth. What went on here?

Outcast, castaway, frigid rain wetting her wet face, ducking over her dead-to-the-world baby, Anke charged swinging her acne-sheathed canvas nose through a peopleless wasteland where all she could do was shudder on and on and on through shadowy aloneliness, throbbing in so much spiritual pain that she had gone semi-numb to her bone terror. In a way, existence had lost its potency, now that it was no longer couched in divinity. Anything could end her, yet of what importance was her end? There was no hell and no heaven, nothing would care when she died, and no entry would be updated in any Book of Life.

Sappy raindrops started falling one by one, each consciously jumping to its death, crying out its final words and plummeting around Anke, dozens of kamikaze raindrops splatting on the sidewalk in hopes of nirvana.

I seemed to weigh 300 pounds. Stalactites of back pain icicled into the tops of her legs—and indeed lumbago would dog her the rest of her days, would grind her into her grave. Busted and flustered, moaning wind from the woeful hole in her soul, she forded onward, blondeness bananaish against the dirky darkness, her footsteps echoing out and skulking back to her full of cosmic noise, empty of home and safety. Life was suffering, and this convoluted route through nowhere an illustration of that sick credo. The human condition: battered, with stained covers, yellowed and scribbled over. Pages falling out, streets falling out, pop-up childhoods falling out. The past flickering like a far-away radio station. And dreams furry with oil-dust. What misery was she raising her baby to endure? What wars, what lions, what cancer and what torture? How much pain had she brought into the world? Even Marty couldn’t stand her! Even the cat killed itself trying to escape her! And oh her baby, her baby who never faced her, who refused to meet her eyes! She had thought she was blessed! She had thought she’d met God! And yet everyone hated her!

Now her sneakers thunked over metal mesh in whose tiny diamond interstices diminutive eyes opened one by one, millions of subtle and unseen watchers all viewing her from a slightly different perspective, Anke fracturing across myriad minds, synchronically and diachronically, her fear and suffering reflected down through billions of pages, the overwhelming majority of them not written by me. But this shattering into millions contained by other minds was not felt by her, then. No, in those minutes she felt very much like one self, one tiny capsule of a person, one dissolving pill of a girl, both nothing and one, just one, indivisible except by zero and all too visible, imagining cruel eyes all around her but never underfoot, one in the sky but none staring up from under.

The air stank of melted plastic, caked garbage, perfume of pee, fried flesh, bad beer, old dog, cat corpse. There was a vastness that was somehow small, an openness that was somehow closed. From someplace both distant and close, borne toward her on hot chariots of wind, came the ack-ack-bacchanaliac cracks of whips and tortured shrieks of agony or bliss, all distorted by rain ruffling like curtains, by the winds’ hands slapping her face as she staggered onward soaked and exhausted and confused and in so much grey pain that all this circumfluent strangeness seemed sensical and straightforwardly true.

Ahead, planted at the hub of many left-branching catwalks, set high atop an escarpment fringed with blinking white lights, rose a boxy iron mirador. Anke clanked up and peeked inside: no bigger than a closet, this sniper’s cabin was mostly a window sans glass, its sill the only place to sit. Scooching her bum onto it, she was wetly hugged by her overalls’ sopping denim. At least Stefsie had his bitty eyes shut; although his Lilliputian lips paddled as if he were prattling, he was clearly unconscious. Which was really lucky—because she was having a f**king breakdown, her body splitting, her heart heaving, a hot hard knob palpitating bloody beneath her forehead… she was dying, she was dying.

Eardeep in worries, she rotated her head and its autonomic homunculus to the mirador’s view, but the view did not materialize instantaneously, remaining an anteconceptual dissonance of muzzy forms for much longer than natural. She blinked many times, tapped her lids as if they were cathode televisions losing transmission—and pow! The scene solidified all at once, burst through the locked doors of her perception, and kicked its way into the inmost halls of her central conception, where it unified into a sight immense and overwhelming and visually deafening, millions of times larger than she, in pulsing, retching, antsy life: the true face of the world: quintessence of Cantada in 1989:

Its roofs stripped, its walls fallen, the city was a roiling mass of machinery, engines coughing, turbines churning, ducts mazing through gory industrial hardware, machines feeding on meat, blood, bones. In this child-eating Molochite city, prison production lines ran through dining tables and living rooms; schools were factories, stores mesmeric medallions with employees for sale, families mentally-inbreeding clans of chronic backbiters, their multitudes of feuds scrabbling and scribbling, verbal violence scraping away at any bright patch of happiness, every room, every chat host to ten battles; down there tiny disheveled dads scurried and ducked after trails of bread-coins, screaming and stabbing each other over pennies, while beautiful daughters stood on rotating diases and sobbed, desperately hoping they’d be purchased before their youth expired—still, humanity, for all their shouted fear and anger and envy, made up only a fractious fraction of this inhuman uncommunity, this preapocalyptic commercescape where cars and planes and trains ruled, spaghetti junctions led only to other spaghetti junctions, draconic slag slopped down toward lakes blue as methylene, highways were inked with a marginalia of crash-killed corpses, sleekly gleaming screens filled with the sky with products and faces that were also products, and even the smoked sun had donned a caliginous djellaba of smog and squatted brooding over an open-cast mine whose insides were bleeding pink sulci—all shown on a flickering king screen that backed the entire world, across whose static heavens noised the fuzzy vision of all that could have been, fuddled diffractions of paradise, greens too heart-wrenching to behold, the muddy, mossy greens of gone dreams.

29 – ICE-LIGHT OF THE STAINED MIND

Later she’d name this sight a vision, not only because it was physically impossible and blatantly strange, but also because it was chockful of alien concepts, critiques, and interpretations way beyond her scope; it turns out that the scariest thing about a vision is the inrush of ideas you could never have had, concepts you might not be able to interpret till years later or (as in her case) with the aid of a symbologist, an archetypist, an anti-modern augur of dreams. But all explicantia would come later—for now there were only inexplicable explicanda. For now only fear. Despair. Inconsolability. Bewilderment. The hopelessness of her speck of flesh in the mirador’s tiny window, a crumb peeping out from between the teeth of the machines that would eat her, the industrial complex whose hungry metal mouths machicolated beyond all horizons, to the wintry ends of the desert of the real. Every grisly detail—and there were billions—sliced into her eyes. Every reek forced the gates of her nose. Pain upon pain upon pain, in a gurgling swamp of mind-liquefying terror, of—reality. Yea, there was only one horseman needed for Armageddon—and his name was Truth. Truth trampled in ten million shards of himself through her hunched silhouette. Truth shoved his fell horse’s forehoof down her esophagus, thrusting into her lung. Truth, bellowing about nothingness so loudly she couldn’t even make out his precise words, pillaged her of all hope and capacity for hope, all optimism, happiness, goodness, love. She was left a sack of riddled skin, still sagging around Truth’s hoof’s hole, a violated ape dying of death.

By now she had dried off but was plastered with dust and dirt, as if the self-slaying rain ricocheted off something filthy before it ever hit her. Mud crusted her blondeness, brown pads cracked when she shifted. Only her eyes were clean, but swept clean, hosed clean, two balls of lucidity amid such muck, her terror billboardized. Leaning over, she looked at what lay directly below: a moat of fog. No way to tell how far it went down—far enough, anyway, to guarantee instant death upon impact. All told, a fall would bring death within seconds, an end easy in comparison to life, to the natural route of protracting her suffering over decades in a machine world, disintegrating under the impatient torture of dementia or cancer or pesticide poisoning, watching her own beloved kid grow up hobbled and sickened by a sick world, bullied by the merciless modern barbarians bent on shaping him into a servant to be sacrificed to their idols of molten gold. Bitter wind whipped her gritty bob as she stared down at the exit, vague and white and perfect as an antiwedding invitation, as an UNWELCOME mat to the total absence of life and afterlife.

She no longer resembled herself. Vacuum-sealed, the skin under her eyes had quantized into gently sloping stairs leading up to white pools of inverted void. Below her the chasm exerted an upward gravity, shoving the rest of her face inward, compacting it into a crumbling knot of expressive flesh from which the dregs of her strength poured out, leaving only a numb nub like the remnants of a popped balloon. How stupid she’d been! How naïve, to believe! She had understood nothing about the world she was bringing me into. Had denied suffering as motor of the universe and death and nothingness as irrevocable resolutions. Had told herself she would live forever, had fed her head on happy endings as if anybody’s life resulted in anything other than a skull in a pile of skulls. It was all too much. Impossible. Crushing. Yet she couldn’t even cry. She had been drained of all moisture, her inscape just scissured wastelands. And worst of all was not her own anguish, but my guaranteed future agonies, writhing, diseases, afflictions, hardships, loss, indenture to the machine, toothless defeat at the septicemic talons of time. Misery. Misery. Misery.

Anke imagined that she swung her skinny legs to the sill’s outer side, gingerly dangled her muddy runners over the depthy chasm. BANG! The sky and earth snapped shut like jaws whose incisors were skyscrapers and whose molars were clouds. All 206 of her bones tightened with a jerk, as if her string had been pulled, and her heart hid itself bleating in her throat. Sobbing she embraced me, snuffling up my smell of soggy cotton, pear pap and pallid urine. Poor child! Better if I stayed asleep. I wouldn’t, couldn’t understand that the most awful action could also be the bravest deed, if it meant saving me from a lifetime of excruciation in the cold catastrophe called consciousness. A mother protects her child at any cost, and sometimes (as when a hamster eats her babies) protection means protection from life. To jump would be an act of kindness. To jump was basically her duty. She had no other choice… and who would even care? Not Marty, Marty couldn’t stand her! Marty thought she was stupid and shit and worthless… and he was right! He was right about everything! Where else could she go from here? There was no way out, nobody would shrug, the world’d be better off, and everyone would be happier… and so on, ad mortem. Hugging me, unable to weep out the apologies bubbling in her throat, she leaned forward. Kicked the wall. Toppled off.

The scream that spawned from my ma’s maw was the scream of the world, the orotund screel of the clenched sphincter of her inherited spirit, roundest sound she ever made and synecdoche for all the sorrowing keens ever produced by her phylogenetic branch, the screeched expression of 3 billion years on a nonstop and nauseating merry-go-round of extravagant agony. Blurring into ur-mother and ur-child, we hurtled like eternal symbols down past the chasm’s wall of windows, our fall witnessed by innumerable invisible watchers while she howled, her hurled soundwaves ricocheting and striking her and embedding sonic shrapnel in her wind-whipped skin. Then her voice shattered.

In the gorge’s sodden fog no bottom ever appeared. Moored in our embrace, we fell for days, months, years, while I matured into a boy glaring from up close, eyeballs pale and glutinous like lychees, mouth a minus sign, mute and condemning as we fell through chalky emptiness forever, mother and son together in misery and apart in blame, in the perdition to which she had given us, for all eternity my calcining blue eyes staring in ultimate accusation.

֍֍֍

But no, of course Anke couldn’t jump. Maybe she could have offed herself alone, but even if there was no heaven, even if nothing but unbliss and oblivion awaited, even if humans were just piddling, dunging, simian agers doomed to the rack of the years, even then there was just no way in heck she could murder her only son. Not happening! Falling back, juddering and fluttering, she lay her cheek against mine and smelled my suspiration of pear pap. In response to her proximity I blobbled my head, eyes thrashing like tadpoles in eggs, as if I were fighting to wake up but could not… It was now she had her first shimmering inkling there might be something wrong with me, but that thought lay too heavy on top of everything else and she wriggled out from under. Instead, a long sequence of sighs and shudders escaped her, playing the horn of her nose, the kazoo of her throat, the violin of her voicebox, the drums of her lungs. With every sound, two tiny lamellae flaked off the top of her feelings, took wing and flapped away. Space was appearing between her internal organs, the sky dripping into her lungs. Okay—okay. Wiping her brow’s sweaty water, scraping her hair back behind her hair, she shivered as the outer world took focus again, the city’s computery corpse rearing its robotic mausolea. Yet somehow it didn’t look as horrific or surreal as before. Hm. And the rain had abated, somewhat.

Welp, if she couldn’t kill herself, then she had a different no-choice. Right? Now there was no way out except the stairway, she had to stagger down, ask for directions, tend to her child, struggle home and inform her sour and lowering husband that his best buddy had died. And then to fight it out. To be hit by the whip of his words till he cooled or she left him. To pass sleepless nights. To keep on trekking and bumping down the swampy road of her life, toward that infallible collision with the same old black wall across everyone else’s path, doing her best to protect me in a universe where all safety was temporary, incomplete and provisional. It was all so bad. It was awful. But what else could she do? Unable to stomach death, she had to grimace and choke down life.

But how could anyone ever live with death?

Anke left the mirador and slugged off along the escarpment. Its long slope slumped down to an industrial block lightless except at its nadir, at a berubbled crossroad, where three windows were lit up in an oddly familiar concrete bunker half-obscured by a glittering field of men-o’-war-o’-rain. Sketchy as frick, but where else to go? She started downhill, limping with the crippling backache from my deadweight, feet crushed from unaccustomed exercise yet lightened by the light ahead, by the prospect of warmth and rescue. Soon home started to sound downright delectable: oh, for fresh clothes, a warm shower, hot chocolate and a ham sandwich, the barrier of a locked door! Bed, cuddles! Life!

In brief, her third eye had to close so the other two could open. It had to stop casting its wavery illumination upon the shiftings of a doggish deity, so that her two humoral eyes could sup on the light of the corporeal world. She had to stop thinking to see. So it goes: Lost in self-projections, she frequently needed years to think a single thought through, but at other times so many epiphanies unwrapped themselves instantly that their explosive decompression ruptured her mind, and a seared layer of onionskin peeled off her internal Earth. Again and again, all at once she saw what she’d missed. Like now:

It seemed so obvious! The cat may have died, but she had not, not yet, not for a long time hopefully, and for now she was 20, limbs and membranes intact, in a country far from any war. In fact, by almost any standard she was absurdly fortunate, with her spacious and gorgeous apartment, her amazing and sensitive baby son, and her immensely talented and hyper-intelligent husband, who yes could be an absolute hooligan at times—yet he too was just tormented, sad and afraid and imperfect… and so but if God wasn’t real, if God had never been, if we were merely electrified meat, well, then our confused and hurtful deeds were all the more understandable. Poor lost animals! We were all under so much pressure, traumatized, guaranteed to lose in the end…

Yet there was no choice. No choice but to live, to limp on, to accept and embrace the labor of being three mortals bound to love one another, sworn to become better, to change, above all to help one another despite and because of transience, difficulty, doom, the coming end of everything, to huddle together in our slim sunlit shard of time and space, to comfort one another in front of our picture window onto an eternity that had no idea we existed.

BOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMM!

Was that thunder? Had a gruff cloud developed a barking cough? The rain, far from slowing its buzzing parade of aerial formations, drilled down in harder waves than ever, crowding the forenoon darkness with so many chittering liquid locusts that she could no longer shield her baby from a thorough waterdrubbing. Harrying herself on through aches and agonies, she hied short-breathed to the apparent storm-port of the concrete bunker’s quadrilateral tripartite light—and stopped cold. And stared down, having forgotten the rain.

On the sidewalk, extending at a slant from the bunker’s glass door, lay a golden parallelogram of pulsing light, an italicized rectangle curly-scaled with subtle florescent light-flowers, wavering and oddly alive and already freaky enough on its own without the simple figure at its center, a tetrapodal sign that had slapped her in the brain. Constructed of the whitest light she’d ever seen, shining amid darkness that had come from her eyes, there flickered on the wet pavement the unfocused form of an all-too-familiar four-lobed symbol:

Dear sweet broken Anke laughed nervously, smile crinkling like a strand of steel wool. To think a cross would confront her now! When it had lost all power! When it was nothing but an empty plus sign, adding zero to zero!

A ridiculous coincidence. She prepared to step over it to the door.

How funny. How hilarious, ha ha ha ha gulp.

And yet suddenly somehow it was no longer funny.

All the floaty metaphysics of the post-fall weeks bassooned out around her, each hazy holy theory a harmonically vibrating instrument in the ultra-complex orchestration of an ineffable swell of meaningless meaning.

The new cross struck her like a throwing knife that didn’t need to be thrown to strike. She reared back, square chin melting into stodgy neck, already elderly and enfeebled and polydiseased, spiritually sick as any resident of Hell. All her hairs turned white, then burned like sparkler fuses toward her mind.

There was no escaping them. No running. These crucifixes of light, slanted athwart the only way forward, had been flung into her path. They had been sent as signs, sacred gauntlets from God, personal challenges from the Templar Lamb himself. Dare to disbelieve, will you? O foolish, demon-led girl!

And now the crosses began to palpitate.

Their four tips bent, became obverse. Then dual-lobed. Then fleury.

They morphed into Tau Crosses, St. Peter’s, St. Andrew’s, circles above crosses, crosses of circles, two circles, infinities, crosses of lemniscates.

On and on the pattern of light slinked through dizzying nonsequiturial concatenations of notations and connotations, seeming to express something definite with its mutating series of magical symbols, but in a code she could not crack, in a signal whose indecipherability terrified Anke out of her weepy wits.

She swallowed and finally looked up. Through the glass door she saw the blinding, light-lashed eye of a projector pointed at the sidewalk. Beyond it, through the glare, there was what looked like a classroom for children.

No other choice…

Sopping wet, clasping extra tightly my suspiciously limp body, Anke pushed open the door and squelched inside just as the lightning struck ten.

30 – THE HIEROPHANTESS MANIFESTS

In the convention hall’s mass bathroom’s long mirror Marty knotted his tie assiduously, one corner of his tongue sticking out. His head had been denuded of stubble, was just smooth stainless flesh, a leathered eggshell with the pattering propulsion of his pulse beating in its stubborn eigenrhythm. Below that perfect ovoid dome he was all jig-jagged angles, lumberjack nose bumping like a breakneck mountain road, stone-lantern jaw jutting like a jetty, trim black blazer and button-up accentuating the flatness of his belly. Klein aber fein, as an earlier German girlfriend liked to say. He had let his beard rampage for three days and looked a lil rough, a lil raunchy, a lil jaded and depraved, like he lived wildly but just couldn’t help looking immaculately groomed and diabolically dishy. Damn, he was still in the prime of his prime, after all these years. He sighed. Really it was too bad he’d fought with my ma. She shoulda known better, but ah fuggit he’d get her flowers or somethin’. Later. For now there were other monsters to slay. He plugged himself into his own blue gaze, smiled without showing his teeth, hooted like a modern-day war chief. Lez go, bro! He thumped his pec three times, took his grooming gear and left for his long long day of getting lowballed by anthropoids and blackballed by snobs and blueballed by saccharine and seemingly eager people who just could not open their purses even if commanded by the god of beauty himself.

Now Marty, looking neither left nor right, was sitting ramrod, stalwart and blue-collarly aristocratic in a fauteuil throne whose armrests were carved into colossal gazelle horns. Above him a many-spiked cyclops-skull glared, complementing the impregnable fortress of his expression. Today even fewer attendees than usual had stopped to admire his work, probably because he had the steel aura of a prodigal sensei who can be approached only after laboring up an abusive mountain of rebarbitude. Usually he looked approachabler, humorous and ironic if not exactly friendly, ridiculized and mitigated by his wife’s gaudy vases, but today he had left her vases in the van, for this regional-level fair had few of the small-town elderly types who were her exclusive clientele, and anyway it was too important an occasion for him to smudge his image. Her silliness always foiled his seriousness, he thought—and that’s why no one accepted his prices, why he never sold anything larger than a knickknack. No one ever looked with the right eyes! All they saw were kitschy pitchers, his class, his roughneckness, or the shocking and reprobate sight of a chiseled nipple. Fuck it! Someday, someone important would persuade these lead-deadened idiots to look more closely. They would recognize his mastery…

Stroking the giant wooden horns he’d so lovingly carved, Marty gazed loftily over the crowd, both intensely himself and nobody at all, self-contained and containing nothing, trying with all his might to broadcast exactly who he was, and mostly performing for himself.

Fuckin Anke, dude. She probably had her feet up, watching TV.

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Anke crossed the crucifixed threshold, expecting anything. Expecting a vision of the end of time. A judge banging high atop his pulpit. An ithyphallic devil slobbering on the writ of her damnation. A floor that would collapse underneath her into flames, while Satan danced a happy little molestery jig.

Instead she got a classroom with twenty-five schooldesks, the chalkboard spotless. On the transverse wall hung a catenary of A4 sheets each printed with a single letter made of many smaller letters, making up the motto:

JESUS SAID: BECOME PASSERSBY.

Anke said, “Hello?”

Silence stuffed itself into silence, silence turned inside-out and revealed silkier silence. And the empty room breathed on her cheek. Her heart hurried in place, shot steam, chugged along its aortic track past the scrabbling shadow claws of a cloud of deep dark deafening nothingness, of invisible ink spilling from the classroom’s far end, billowing from a dim doorway which she had not noticed before, which perhaps had not been there at all. This horrible mortal portal shimmied like a mirage, zipped and zapped, switched and glitched, now 2d, now 3d. To my flustered and deathly delirious mother, it looked like a shortcut out of the world, leading straight from our rigged reality and into whatever lay beyond, whether hell, paradise, oblivion or the unimaginable.

But not for all the diamond mansions in seventh heaven would she ever, ever poke a toe into that inscrutable hinterland—and soon her paralyzed, deer-in-headlights mind reawakened from its daze and bounded back toward more ordinary territory: the pains of her chilled child. She looked at me.

And saw nothing less brutal than her utter failure as a mother.

Held up by the harness, I lolled pallid and filthy, bloody-lipped, seaweed-haired and infraconscious, pinkish drool fluidly armoring my chub chin. The classroom sphinctered around her, and a big bad breath kicked its way up her nostrils. She slid into a desk-seat, detached me, and propped up my haggard, wrinkled quasi-corpse, at which point I began coughing like the world’s oldest Victorian orphan. This hacking rattle, this consumptive wheeze, made me seem awake, but then it ceased and my balding head collapsed back, snot gushing, muzzle gaping as I drowsily gurgled out a long raspy whirling whimper that would have been more appropriate coming from the littered lungs of an insurance agent shillelaghed by ten stouts and a lifetime of disappointment.

In her ribcage skulls bloomed. She clucked my name, wiped my chin, smoothed my hair, clucked my name a second and a third time.

I did not respond.

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Ever since the blitz of cateyed images, I had soared from my babyish brain through higher consciousnesses, bursting through mind after mind after mind, each complexer and convexer and self-compliciter than the last, the early ones roughly constructed from motherboard metropoles of gene-wired insanity signed and designed by their iron environments, the later brains so alien and architectonically deluxe that entire universes constituted the crusted manifestations unrolling as support for their larger thoughts, trillion-year post-cognitions converging and intwining and analytically synthesizing into hyperrealities so advanced that inside them concepts like space and time were nothing more than neon-lit arrows marking the method of assembly, signs meant to guide the greenest and most obtuse of neophytes—for even up in the Ever, against all omniscience, a few transcended fanatics hung on to the concepts of Beginning and Ending, somehow, though such clockish misapprehensions needs must confute their own axes and bases and theses, since a beginning must come after something, and an ending before something else. Nay, neither eternity nor ternity may compleat our chronologies, therefore and therefive and theresix time is a trick our inferior senses are playing upon us, a trick we may never understand, a trick that will kill us—that’s one thing I thought I saw.

Next, riding the reeking neck of the inhumandarin dragon of my retrotachyonic hallucinations, I descended from metaphysical supertruth into the bone-and-blubber universe of the human, of ontogeny and phylogeny, sex and death, action and language, of everything that had ever happened to, been seen or thought up by manunkind. History-headed I was jammed through gibbering visions, assaulted by realities and perspectives and people proclaiming their creeds in tongues I could not ear, in equations I could not equate, while the past moved, its fixed events looping in place, populated by semi-human shadows turning ever more obscene, apocalyptic, and surreal, while centuries rattled in a tincan, eras banging against one another in darkness haunted by their august light. This hysterically scrambled kit and caboodle confused the cool out of my added noodle; unable to establish A, Z, or anything between, I did the natural thing, and shrieked out of septillions of mouths—but that kakaphony only worsened my nerves, and, flailing against these most bewailable ailments, I grasped at a text that branched into millions, gasped at millions of texts converging into one, picked up a period only to see within its smooth black hull a labyrinth, and fell back, and knocked against metaphorical statues representing saving sins and vile virtues, ruinous rewards and profitable punishments, my somatic body hitting the cosmic ceramic and exploding out into every corner of Self and Other, dispersing into byways, crooks and nooks, into every blankness and blackness, my self forcing myself out, axonic vines tracing my name on air. Living every life and dying every death, I yearned and burned for a still point, a fixity, a full stop, praying and braying for The End.

And The End obliged like a butler, zapped in and bowed to me humbly though it was a colossus blocking my whole view, a bending flat-fullness extending infinitely far in all directions, through which all existences were transmitted into the morbidest shades of peace and quiet. But I was not afraid, for once in my lives. To me, this obsequious void was verily a haven, a dark rest, a sweet surcease. Anke was crying and shaking me and pinching my baby-arm, yet I could not be arsed to return. What, and confront all that fear? That life of strife? No frigging way: the bulging black exit was fluffy as a satin pillow, and its loving smother would be a welcome moksha. At last, here was my chance! At last the real exit! For such a long long long time, I’d been driven by a mission, but a mission I did not consciously understand, a ragged motive driving me through life after life, toward something I was supposed to do yet which remained forever out of reach, for I was pursued in all my forms by an implacable curse, an enemy that hunted me through all times and spaces, killing me and killing me and killing me. I could not die and yet had to die, and died and died, and died and died and died and died, without ever dying far enough.

Yet I was not alone, out there in that awesome Valley of Amenti, beyond the frayed hem of materiality, in that existential backend where all the ontological switchboards and nomological effect-pedals were jacked into one another and multi-modulating the manysong of the multiverse. No—amid all that living text was the white hole of my mother’s mind: hot, dense, and made of light, questing for me though the spincycle of spatial times. She had chosen life and chosen me, in other words had come back to me at last, with the armor ripped from her heart; and against my own wayward will, against my knobstreperous rebellion, I was drawn to her, hooked by her pull. Thrashing toward the world, coughing out the water of death, slipping phrenic fingers into the meat mitten of my mangled brain, I flapped up to meet her love.

But our reconciliation never coalesced. Just as my horizons chuted into one tiny bipedal outpost, somebody new interrupted, an interloper who took form in another room, then set off down halls and walkways, closing in at top speed, an infrared figure who ghosted through walls and sliced out behind Anke.

I jolted awake.

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My head was a ram battering itself; I was squidgy and frigid; I was poison plague; even my heart was a dropsical skull-and-crossbones. I would have loved to complain yet my mouthsie was frozen into a trembling beak and would not clack, and at most I could only hang on grimly while reality receded and approached like a stop-motion ocean.

Hunched over me, propping up my pained limped frame a bit too firmly, Anke goggled into my eyes. Quaking, she looked like the end of the world burning in a garbage dump: strife-crazed and tear-stained, tousled and muddy, whipstrands of hair gunked to her cheek, naked fear transfiguring her features into a grotesque pietà, her need awful. Awful. Just seeing her made me feel terrible—then angry, then sick with hate, moldy resentment, fungal grudges that myceliumed down to my molten core. Everything bad was her fault.

But I didn’t waste any more pain on that heaving wreck. In the top-left quadrant of my vision there gleamed two tiny but vibrant eyes like hazel tealights trained on me. Those overbright foresty eyes hung suspended in pooling emptiness, abstracted even of intent, casting sight on me as impersonally as photons. To all sides the room screamed inward and imploded, rolled up like a scroll and disclosed stars. Slowly the eyes’ body materialized: first came wire glasses, then a bolstered jaw broad as a sofa, then a frizzy crop of weedwhacked grey curls, and finally a woman entire, squat and stocky, upholstery-shouldered, workmanlike in a black jumpsuit with rolled-up sleeves and five folded chairs wedged under each armpit. This was Norea, to me an unnamed character in miniature, a hyperrealist sketch still and silent as an unread sentence.

“Can I help you?”

Anke, rapt in my reawaking, hadn’t heard her enter; then she’d noticed where I was looking; then her whole body had been dipped ears first into an assured and afeminate voice. She flinched, turned, and threw open her mouth, but her eyes were more eloquent, disbursing salty veins of rich expression.

“Oh, Love,” said Norea, then set down her chairs, lumbered over and hugged Anke sidewise, hesitating but briefly before accepting my mom’s mud onto her splotchless jumpsuit. I viewed this sudden hug from a stolid stranger as a brutal attack: with a tired, feathery squeak Anke splintered, her skeleton shattered, she limpened and shriveled and was absorbed into the stronger woman, skin slipping off her muscles, lymph and bile and brains like wet scarlet lightning spurting out as her corpse was sucked into that voracious embrace.

Then Norea drew back, touched Anke’s shoulders, and, hazel eyes alight behind scuffed specs, pronounced a prophecy that never lost its power to unsettle my mother, even many years and revelations later:

“You were sent here.”

“…What?”

“You’ll see. But first, let’s get you cleaned up, huh?”

Without waiting for an answer, Norea set off toward the back. Anke swapped one last glance with me; I met her eyes halfway. I’d been petrified in spectation, prey eying a predator whose full hunger was unknown, and now I needed to persuade my mater to remove us and pronto. However, I’d learned that screaming availed me not, so instead I tried kinesics: I distended my cheeks and eyes in a puttoesque pantomime whose proper interpretation ran approximately if you tag after that juggernaut gorgon, Anke, then we are truly in deep, hot water, treading an ocean aboil, and if I could I would make my head explode to escape that fate—a straining display followed by turbulent baby-burble. Alas, Anke was not so into physiognomic cryptography and thought I had maybe done a #2, and so felt even more alone and atrocitized and subjugated to whatever aid outsiders advanced. She picked me up and, fidgeting and tacking like a starling on a leash, followed Norea over the dread threshold, into the deeper chambers of the Temple in the Wasteland.

31 – CELESTIAL PHOENIX ON FIRE

Laddies and gentlewomen, we are now drifting in the cockpit of the final scene that will helicopter around Anke’s consciousness, that monticulous and profuse hotspring of feelings. We’ve choppered around her so closely because regardless of her confusion or contusions or perennial panic, she had been stumbling toward inner freedom, was about to open her eyes and herself, to bumble toward humbling her own fears and becoming her own best version, maturing into the equable and imaginative and talented and all-appreciating woman who bubbled out from the crannies in the riven girl. Visible through her anxiety’s toxic exhaust, past her melancholy’s magma, there had gleamed the treasurous green of personality heaven, of her brain abuzz in air sparkling with butterflies, of her loving and sensitive receptivity which has beckoned me teary-eyed through the years to dwell long, long in this time of her life. After meeting Norea, however would begin to close. Inch by inch she would rumble shut, her Shangri-La would wall itself off, and to go forward she would give up a part of herself that she would never get back.

But she had to do it. She had to go. She had to change. You’ll see.

So yeah. Next that pernicious Pythia led us down a bare linoleum hall past several doors, to a concrete cell lined by bookshelves which crowded around a neatly squared bed under a blue-felt curtain drawn so tightly no light chinked through. Beside the largest bookshelf stood a round wooden table, two rustic chairs, a sink, kettle and hotplate, everything immaculate and at right angles. After Anke had tended to me and slipped on a clean hoodie (“CLASS OF KENOMA ‘84”), we emerged to a table now set with earthenware mugs and bowls of chocolate-chip cookies. While Anke held me in her lap and swidgeled me with a damp towel, I surveyed Norea through fissured eyelids, keeping tabs on that seemingly tame tigress, who had sat and folded her catcher’s paws and was measuring up my ma. Anke had started to relax, but I knew better: I knew we faced the vampiress prime, her belly a-grumble with borborygmic gushings.

Norea had introduced herself as the priestess of a tightknit church with an intimate congregation. “Every Sunday I give a general-interest sermon, but the real meat is in the weekday seminars, when I bring together the more dedicated or advanced members to discuss the scriptures, and God, and Reality, and just what kind of world we’re all trying to survive inside. But you and I can discuss that later. Tell me what happened to you,” she commanded my mom tectonically. “I can’t guarantee that I can help you, but I’ll listen as best I can.”

And the way she said it, you knew she really would listen with all her might, that she’d be extra-there, fit and focused, poised to commit enormous feats and feasts of forgiving responsivity and empathy and boldfaced lovingkindness.

Insecure, Anke tried to resist. “Um, oh, I don’t know. It’s a lot to say. And not very interesting,” she said insincerely, spraying chocolatey crumbs. “And I really should get home, my husband might’ve called…” Prodded by the sacerdotal pro, thusly she hawed and hemmed backward into her story, stutterily apologetic, stopping twice to ask for a phone then careering onward anyway, stroking me or spinning her mug and jabber-ejecting a heaving horde of charging words, blistering fragments, tangents, reactions, tittles of tales teeming out untidily in all directions, since she never decocted a story but adorned it with every bauble of emotion and observation it had ever gleaned in all its revolutions through her busy head. Heaving with the aftershocks of sobs, she related the tramp and the Goofy vision, the trance weeks, the doubt, the guilt, the fight, the dead cat, the death of her idea of God, the timely cross of light, protesting, “I’m afraid I’m committing some mortal sin. I don’t want to do the wrong thing! I just want to be good! I promise!” There were galaxies of things she did not know, she was nobody and nothing and had only ever glimpsed knowledge as a distant mystery she hadn’t even begun to grope toward, there were canonical lists and heavenly catalogues of her ignorance, so how could she ever dare to have a single thought about the deepest mysteries? How could she be so crass to presume she knew anything? How could she ever have denied Him? “Will I be punished? Will I go to Hell? I didn’t want to doubt! I’m sorry!”

No longer stifled and bog-eyed, Anke was restored to the blushing peach-bloom of her young youth, with green torrents of sparkling verbiage cascading from her mouth, drowning us in the scintillant whirlpoolage of her mood-tangled language, the dammed-up fears and hopes loosed by Norea’s willing ears.

How irritating, I felt—and if only she would stop!

Throughout her speech, I fought to cultivate a nugget of cool. Thoth bless my poor concussed soul, for even in my dismay and diffusion, I was stuck in my new mode: I had chosen cold: that’s why I was shivering, right? But the book-nook cell collapsed in pulses, and I’d been jolted out of joint, stretched too saggy, was dissolving into incoherence and tohubohu, becoming a choleric adult-faced tot from a bungled medieval frieze by a monk who had never seen a baby, though even that metacular image veered and evolved severely, fanning me with the flipping pages of new ideas, forcing me through umpteen tableaux. Arsy-versy chockablock, I felt like a pastiche of Pierrot and Cowboy by a sadistic Dadaist, and I so wanted to get off this ride, please, I just wanted to be one again, to fit together under my face, to unbomb my bammed brain.

But I couldn’t hold myself still, no matter how hard I tried; and amid all that migrainous crimson, all that spinning, agitant surrealism, there was only one stillness, one silence, one pivot of reference: Norea, both immovable object and irresistible force, her anchored self-confidence subtly wrenching the scene toward her own perspective. Anke, mired in recital, had missed Norea’s expressions, missed that as the plot points of our story rolled past and clinked into chains, the preacheress had gone from intent to intense, from immobile to vibrantly emotive, startled sharp and cogitating hard, revving with golden fire, powering up into a lux richness of deep-pile spiritual feelings whose anything-but-static electricity lit up the rainbow crystal in the spacious center of her scripture-decked conceptarium, producing in her eyes a testamental light so dazzling it made the overhead lightbulb look like a source of darkness.

When Anke trailed off, the black-jumpsuited priestess stood and smiled enigmatically. No words had emerged from her purplish lips in some minutes. She plucked down a folio tome, opened it and slid it under our faces.

I shivered back in shock.

The book’s round frontispiece was the most amazing cartoon I’d ever seen, just painfully terrific, so vivid, dynamic, and intricate that I felt taken back, faceslapped. Near tears, I wrung my baby hands at that magic illustration, a bulging roundel of two exultantly murderous comic-book beasts clawing and snapping symmetrically into each other’s behinds—an azure bear with vermilion eyes, over a vermilion cat with azure eyes, both snarling with savage animal laughter as they ornately interbit in churning cyclical duality.

Anke and I stared with circle eyes and circle mouths at that furry ouroboros churning with acid colors, then looked up simultaneously with identical superheadached expressions of atomically demolished mindblownness.

I loved cartoons! Whee! Art has always been the quickest road to my heart… After this moment, my stance on Norea totally reversed. I now adored her and she was wonderful, gleaming on a Doric pedestal far above my soiled parents. Brain-bonked, I swiftly forgot I’d ever mistrusted her. Who could hate Norea?

Steel-wire-haired, potent, looking for all the world like a professor of antiquities heading to outer space, my newest heroine met Anke’s gaze and intoned, “‘Elohim has the face of a bear, Yahweh the face of a cat. One is just, the other unjust. Elohim rules over water and earth, Yahweh over fire and wind.’ And a bear, as you know, is the next thing to a dog. You think that’s a coincidence?”

Anke was thunderstruck into perplexity. Thirty years later she’d tell me that the bear/cat roundel had terrified her, made all her thoughts scream and leap right out of her head; she barely understood anything Norea was saying, though she was soothed by the priestess’s unrufflable self-containment.

“Love, all sorts of seekers come my way. They arrive with differing levels of problems, of insights, of spiritual curiosity and capability. But one way or another, and often by the unlikeliest routes, they are drawn here, and I induct them, and we begin to learn together. We try to figure out where we are, what we know, what’s going to happen next, and what each one of us has to do. Over six years we’ve grown to about 30 initiands, and each has proved herself special, and become an essential member of our quest for the sacred. Sometimes we’re so blessed we make breakthroughs every week, every day, every hour.”

My former ma and I—Madonna and Bambino, in mandorlas of ironic light—stared ring-eyed and saucer-mouthed, medievally Matissesque in our disquiet.

“Yet today,” the preacheress pressed, “you’ve come to me with something new. Others have had visions. They had dreams. Encounters. They had started to catch on in minor ways to the truth. But you!” she exclaimed with real wonder, “You, as young as you are, as scared and isolated as you were, have been granted an unusual privilege, something important, something esoteric and normally hidden. Believe me, Love: the homeless man, your experience, the dog and cat, they all fit together, in the larger puzzle we have assembled.”

I was in awe. I had never seen anyone like Norea. Not even close. Had believed all women to be soft fresh flushed maidens or creaking, weather-scoured crones with jam-dabs on their jabbly jowls, either way all receding yieldingness and frangibility. But this broad, Sartre-faced hierophantess carried herself with craton-centered confidence, with the untiring unblinking unswayability of one who has built up a mountain-moving momentum. Even surfing an upswell of afflatus, she had no maddened, wobbly intensity, nor colorful fabulous bluster, but a cool calm self-anchored sense of righteousness.

But Anke was withdrawing, wearied of shock. Dry and warm, drinking milky tea and wolfing moist cookies, with me awake and apparently content in her lap, she had been overtaken by yearny nostalgia for gemütlich, unsupernatural life. How awkward: now that she’d confessed to the stormy complex roiling in the witch’s cauldron of her conscience, she suddenly no longer cared about answers or questions, and mostly wanted to go home and sleep, to forget. The eerie emblem pushed by the sturdy priestess was just way too stressful. This whole situation was somehow wrong, somehow off… Then it hit her: there were no crosses here, in this spartan carrel whose only decoration was blue-felt draperies sealing off the window to the parking lot. She skewed a look at Norea.

“Um, by the way… this is a Christian church…?”

Norea laughed warmly. “Amen! Anke, the Gospel of Philip says: ‘Truth is never born naked, but comes fleshed in symbols and images. The world cannot receive truth in any other way.’ Unfortunately, this means most people neither encounter nor recognize the truth. There’s hardly a more debased concept than socialized Western Christianity.” Stumping up and down, she ran a hand through her short-circuited hair, calm as corked champagne freshly shaken, with the same assertive fizz of dry sparkle. “But I’m getting ahead of myself… Normally I’d never mention that on a first meeting. Most postulants attend the general sermons for months before they begin incorporating deeper truths into their world-systems. There are levels and levels of knowledge, more than you can now imagine, and the higher ones can drive the unprepared insane.”

In fact, Norea was the most perilous woman ever to haunt our much-haunted minor bankdom of Crampton—and I was falling in love with her, this summoner of magical-animal drawings, this Joan of Arc at 50, who blazed with the triumphant purity of a celestial phoenix flown direct from Heaven’s fires.

“However,” she added, “considering all you’ve experienced, and its clear relevance to the wider goals of the Church, I don’t have any choice but to make an exception. I have to introduce you—cautiously, and within strict limits—to a few mysteries normally prohibited to inexperienced members.” Norea conjured up a chryselephantine spoonlet and stuck it under the tap. “But before I can tell you word one, I need to perform a harmless little ritual called the First Seal, okay?”

Anke, despite her growing skepticism, slouched and hugged me tight as a teddy, peeping over my bald pate as if I were her shield. “Will the ritual hurt?”

Norea tittered, then took Anke’s left hand, muttered something obscure, and dolloped a blob of water on the pinkie’s knuckle.

“There. Now I can explain to you a little.”

32 – HYPOSTASIS OF THE ARCHON

Now okay fine, obviously I, as a buffeted baby, was not in any state to uptake the finer details of Norea’s metaphysical circus-thriller of a tale—but in the years to come I would squirm through thousands of her stirring sermons and telestic lectures, all of which would set the itsy-bitsy propeller atop my brainlet whirring with daze-pated exhilaration. In short, I am more than capable of reconstructing that maenad-pontiff’s lessons from A to Z to Z², from good evil to evil good, literatim; and therefore I recommend that you trust me unreservedly, my baby-dolly-buttercuppy, trust me and this torrid tale in every possible way, without allowing a solitary hairy doubt to slouch into your precious princess mind as I bait you with my personal version of Norea’s crazed fables. Of course her cosmic lore, filtered many times over through my infantesque perspective, may sound faffy and far-fetched to you… nevertheless it drenched my sense and nonsense all the way down to this sentence; and her cosmogony has a real killer moral—a punchline that uppercuts. Watch out!

But first I should mention that before Norea launched the third-eyed innerspaceship of her transtemporal saga, she stopped to deliver us a useful monition. She urgently needed to remind us, she said, of her own problematic imperfection and indeed the pressing incompleteness of all human communication—as we listen, she insisted, we must never forget that her heady history of the highest realities would be limited and restricted by her personal shortcomings, by the hybrid boundaries of human brains, and by our fatally flawed and fettersome language, which, with its jackbooted word-after-word march and programmed sequences of cause-and-effect, is disastrously inapt for unpacking higher truths. All speech misleads. To truly capture such altitudinous concepts, we would need a supralanguage whose locus of motion lay beyond lower-dimensional life, we would need a non-temporal, non-spatial organ capable of something higher than thought, would need the polychroic brain of a superdeity, glittering like a rainbow disco ball turned inside out and cross-lighting itself with a billion billion spangles. A brain which may at times, she hinted, be available to us… But not now, not today. Today we would get the beginner’s vision. The coloring tome, all outlines. Listen with your eyes.

And but so: hear ye, hear ye, nave-gazers and mumpsimuses:

In the beginning there was, like, one really big dude. This dude’s so fuckin’ big, you shouldn’t even try to comprehend it; just gawp in awe at your idea of his feet. Dear my sweaty lil cupcake, you must be modest now: you are in the diegetic presence of sun-white royalty, for this dadly dude before you, this dazzlingly superb poohbah, this simmering immortal of immaculate symmetry composed from a maelstrom of apeiron within higher-geometrical proto-numbers, is no one less than the ALL! The Divine Spirit! The iterating series of infinities known as the Depth! His glory is transapocalyptic! His majesty destroys! And forsoothly, when pondering the Depth’s impregnable enigma, we must always wear the mental equivalent of eclipse goggles over our pineal eyes, for anyone who attempts to prehend him directly (even if she’s borrowed the brain of an angel) won’t just go loco but also jerk out of spatiotemporal joint, glitching in spasms as her mind ruptures and leaks out into the hungry, the devouring, the insatiable insensate insensible Incomprehensible! or whatever.

By the way, in case you’re confused, the Depth is certainly not the Christian God, though the latter is an atrabilious adulteration of the aforementioned. Neverthewhat, you may use our familiar Trinity as a basis to grasp the structure of the Divine Spirit’s First Action—an initial act which was actually kind of predictable, being only what any male would have done, said Norea: that is, the Depth concocted a sexual associate; that is, our omnicausal perenniality, a conceptual artist extra-extraordinaire whose fantasies become realities, conceptuated triple-hard and spurt-tapestried out a female spirit called the Aeon of Barbara, a femme emanation both a part of and apart from him, both one and not one; in Christian myth she survives as the Holy Spirit.

A goddess hidden in mystery, glistening like a geometric clitoris in her cowled godhood, the Aeon of Barbara was born ready to think and create and feel, and all with a flaming majesty we can’t begin to imagine. Most importantly, however, she could already mate and emanate, and so with no further delay, the deathless dyad locked in, got down diggy-down-down and—(ahem)—generated the second emanation, the cosmic daughter known as Zoë. And barely had Zoë undulated into being, wet and gleaming with Z-ray infrafluorescence, when that prenatural lass warped and wove back around and into and through her nonpareil progenitors, three-waying with them into a Möbiusioid figura serpentinata, all cross-singing harps spiral-strung over honking rainbow holes, which then musically, supertemporally outlaced into twelve deluxe sub-emanations, daughter virtues like Grace, Patience, and Love, the beautiful-but-definitely-not-sexy broodmares of decillions of utopian universes.

At this vista in Norea’s story, Anke, having recovered from the barrage of blood into her blush, remembered the similar cosmos Marty had proposed in that morning’s raging rant, and her spine turned into a lightning bolt that struck the snake of her kundalini.

But that’s not important to my story, so please swivel your adorably mouselike mind back up to the solid gossamer of the All, to the Depth’s extracosmic infininumbers interweaving, emanating a Chantilly lace of high-caliber existences bobbined from Joy and Love and Kindness. It was all going so well! Too well, actually—for the high holy homesteader and his main emanations, humming self-hallelujahs, never had to learn to worry. Deaf to the impending danger of a moral mistake, they would party artly right up until their fiesta of fiats was violently interrupted by a catastrophic crime, a calamitous misdeed which would rend the lower realities like a snotty tissue, tangle the depthic hierarchies into hopeless spaghetti, and engender the junkyard Hell called Earth. Still worse, this celestial felony would be perpetrated by the Trinity’s most special and blessed child, the prodigal daughter known as Wisdom. Wisdom: the original criminal; the very inventor of crime, and the convict inceptive.

Yet this christener of sin was in nowise evil, and not even so bad. It’s like this… Wisdom, familiarly called Sophia, had always been different from her sister-virtues. They were simple; they were happy, perfect and complete; they extolled their received roles and viewed absolutely everything as being for the best, and never pondered unduly on the cryptic and mindbreakingly arcane workings of the sempipaternal Trinity oscillating through them. Those blissful sisters were content to give unceasing, weaving birth to oodle after oodle of rapturous realities—but Sophia, see, being a reification of Wisdom, which is to say of Thought, Mind, and Intellect, by her very nature could not help reflecting, excogitating, and ratiocinating. She had to think, and really it was rather inevitable that one nonday in nospace her restless intellection would stray upward toward the unknowable, and infringe upon what she was never supposed to attempt to comprehend. It all happened almost innocently.

In fact, that balmy non-eon had begun quite agreeably, when Sophia, overstimulated from nonstop conceiving, took a few unyears off to chill at a trillion degrees Celsius minusplus. Absently ruffling her sparky pelt of exalted axons, our doyenne of deliberation offhandedly began to observe the sparkling frizzle of spacetimes minuetting out of her untwisted sisters. That sidereal sorority was pleating a whorling network of spirit-quarks into a lustrous passementerie of higher realities, whirl-swirling out bead-chain lemniscates of otherworldly multiverses—yet the great galumphin’ girls themselves, Sophia mused, were nothing but nexus knots in the bulbous macramé of being. Of what magic ravel were they made? What mazier mysteries could they not even begin to perceive?

And sure, our inquisitive inventress knew on some level that prying into the Unknowable was precarious and repercussive at best, yet she was neither Patience nor Temperance—those two radiant maidens were busy arting as heartly as ever—and so it was without dithering overmuch that the Aethereal Athena literally opened her mind, defocused her saccadic fleets of peacock-fractal eyes, and tried in one great ocular gasp to encompass herself and her sisters and all essence in one leveling gaze. Shaking, straining, bursting against her blindness, at unlong unlast she glimpsed the blurry rims of the squared triangle of greater beings, Barbara and Zoë taking shapeless shape above around through her, spreading into blinding, mutating, all-containing arrays of musico-generative interpossibilities, a ghostly duo of gaseous moucrabieh rhythmically merging up over unfathomable heights toward the Depth…

But her mothers alone were too big to fit in Wisdom’s open-topped mind. She paused in shock, after all just a goddess speck on the Unblinking Eye of the Almighty, just a mosquito beano of an idea projected from within his enigma, liable to be swatted anytime. She had to stop… but, well, she couldn’t stop now, oh no: curiosity had skewered her ego. Already her sisters were distant as stars, her opalescent plumage twitched and whipped, sunquakes were her thoughts and gamma storms were her feelings, dangerous amazements playing her sonorous brain like a xylophone of exopheromones. And truth be tattled, our unimaginable uterator, bit by the bug of self-love, was beginning to conceptualize of herself as an all-gambling autodidact driven by spiritual voracity, an admirable aspiring pantologist with an unslakable thirst for metametaphysical facts... Jaw after jaw dropping like guillotine dominos, she scrutinized the vanguard margin of the predimensional aureola of the Totality, a damasked scintillation coruscating up into the Faultless Father—and for the first time she felt alive. And yet but what was life? Well, maybe she could try to find out…

What she did next can’t be translated into earthly words, so let’s paint it with metaphors until we glimpse through their stained lenses the swimming, falsely colored outlines of the transcendental disaster—I mean let’s picture our maven of musing, that braidly churning and unseeable being, as a cosmogonical moth flying upward, a mammoth butterfly-tassel-bird of solidified mind scissor-flapping up through the stringy aether toward a supernacular saint-sun, conceptual ice crystallizing on her caterpillar plies of argus-eyed, lavolting wings as she battled to reach the originary burning, which however never got nearer but only bigger. Only bigger. Yet space ate her, and soon she realized she’d never make it: her marvelous mind-flesh was already maimed and failing her, while the pulsating supersun of the Divine Spirit was fanning out into a golden filigree of migraines, accordioning into a glistening concertina of infinities that arced around her and consumed its own conflagrating tail, becoming a circumflowing, moaning flame devouring itself over and over, its burning burning, fuel for itself, mysterious, mystifying, meaningless, an ekpyrotic colossus of unintelligible symbols circle-cornering her mind, dreadifying and totalizing and thereby thoroughly demonstrating to Sophia her humble rank, her sucky speckness… and yet and yet and yet, was she not indeed the only entity willing to risk being charred to baryons if it meant she gained even the remotest chance of understanding what exactly was up/down/left/right? Yes! Yes yes yes, she was! she ecstatically affirmed… and so it came about that in mid-flight, mid-failure, our Little Miss Wisdom, though increasingly enclosed by the cold eternal inferno, roughly stilled the fluttering of her frozen bodybrain, gathered her tremoring atman into a determined-if-shaky splash, and then with one last, luxating huff, with one seismic paroxysm of spirit-ripping power, swelled and expelled her body! ejected her self! cleft her trembling consciousness to funnel in the Fullness! and turbo-blazed roaring exploding converging toward an all-encompassing magmatic mind-lock with the preterfortean bruiser known as the Depth, viz., with GOD HIMSELF!

And look, I know her slightly manic curiosity sounds innocentish, but think—Sophia was committing the Fatal Sin. The first and worst Sin everyone commits. The un-self-forgivable but so-common Sin.

The Sin of Pride.

And it was lethal, lethal for every lower being to come. It was the blunder that contained all pain.

I’ll put it this way: As our indepictable, shifting mistress inflated to meet and eat the All, her brain, that moving gate against the obliterating cascades of cosmic information, irised open its porches of perception and—WOW—in rushed a rocket-headed ram of enlightening lightning—ZOOM—with a 10^100,000,000-watt horn of gnosis that crunched through her head—GUH—and pithed her being—AAAAAUUUGGGHHH—hollowing her out in a counter-entropic punch of superdivine plenum along which her seared remains slid down steaming—SCHLOOP—till her bleeding shardselves, shrieking in trillion-skewered pain, pitched down from the perfect fullness, herniating and puking up other hemorrhaging partselves, all shattered by epistemontological data.

Around Sophia, her sisters and mothers crackled into action: fleeing centripetally from the plummeting Promethea, they spontaneously plaited a cordon sanitaire around Wisdom’s hole—and thus everlastingly divided all essence between the Pleroma, which is their pure miracle world, and the Kenoma, a.k.a. our crappy mudpie world, the place that will kill both you and me.

Meanwhile shattered Sophia, falling through her prison, was being brutally dismantled by guilt, shame, and self-hatred. Idiots! she screamed at her frantically dividing minds. Jackasses! Pretenders supreme! Oh, how she’d love to throw herself up!! AAAAAHHHHHHHH! And now, as her batter-brained, pride-polluted spirit festered into self-sarcastic sulfur, she began to emanate helplessly, spurting dirtied material against her own capricious will; and the rancid black bile that torrented forth from her then was abortive and malformed and a sneering affront to all heaven, a raucous mucus of all-mocking chaos-energy that filled her pocket vacuum with illsome laughter. HA! Wha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha HA FUCK! she shrieked, eroding in cataracts across all her fractured forms, her subquantum string-wave-particles dissolving into a Hephaestically hot and rotten proto-liquid, melting into a magmatic globule roiling in a spherical self-prison, a scalding yet somehow moldy teardrop budding in a clockwork glass bead—and then—oh my god—the phialed Isis burst—the snoopy Sarasvati shattered spectacularly—the recalcitrant Rhiannon big-banged and splashed outward resplendently and poured into the contours of the sickening spacetime that we are unlucky enough to call our very own, the crashed plane of existence that we’re deadbolted within, our home of bones.

And although only a dwindling flicker of the surpersonality recently called Sophia remained conscious, still she wasn’t done botching up. Our cursed creatrix had one last indelible delict left to commit. At the very moment of her death, the twelve apotheoses of her worst feelings slithered from her unspooling bodybrain… These escaping emotions, captained by pride, rived her remaining mind to ribbons and then, breaking free from her bubbling muck, ectopically budded each into their ownness—twelve vindictive convictions who would become the twelve vices, twelve evil and disastrous demons who would forever haunt every human, hound every hero, and hinder every heaven.

But not even their emanation was the last step! Finally, and most awfully of all, the deadly & diabolic duodecuplets, those unfunhouse mirrors of holiness, snaked back and sludged around one another like swampy fingers closing in a chittering fist and then clown-ballooned into a composite monster—an emergent king of dickcheesious darkness. Twelving into one, the troupe of prime vices had fused into a queasy, neronian parody of the Depth.

Jeering and leering, gleeking and reeking, this grotesque harlequin godling possessed thousands of names and multipolar identities—but we the halfway knowledgeable refer to him (with a slimed shudder) as ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ.

33 – WHEN LIGHT IS THE NIGHTMARE

Norea, with her sensible gold specs and upfuzzy hairdo, had the air of a spinsterish aunt who had taken mescaline, goggled God, and returned to tell the tale sensibly, the peg of her soul fitting no less flush into her squarish flesh because she had undone the ultimate secrets of her universe. She had this special power: to relate the weirdest ideas with down-to-earth good humor, shaking her head at the follies of gods, shrugging rather than thumping her tub.

Anke was still clinging to her skepticism. Goofy wasn’t a blue bear, Chief Tiger’s eyes had been not blue but green, and anyway where were they in all this madcap poppycock? Also, she was pretty sure Norea meant to compare her to Sophia, but forbidden knowledge hadn’t been so so so important to her own fears and tears. And the tale’s undertones of smut, even in their bowdlerized form, discomfited her greatly. All the same, there had been a few scary coincidences, enough that, instead of fleeing, she kept adjusting her position, shifting me on her lap, looking down into the crop circles on my spiralous crown and listening without seeming to listen, against her own best instincts.

ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ… Norea’s slithery enunciation of the dread epithet, which rasped like no human tongue, made the lights stammer and spit. ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ… that annihilating nightmare against brightness, that all-diddling bigwig of the biggest and baddest dreams, is, in his naked form and nature, inconceivable to spuds like us—but we may imagine him as darkness carved with oversharp, almost sadistic detail into a short, scrawny, jittery, and mop-haired teenage boy, his face a grisly scramble of selves, his fingers shadow talons, his feet cartoonishly huge flippers. Malicious but pathetic, murder incarnated but also a lonesome sack of turds, this sad sappy shadow had awoken alonely in soundless, stinking darkness, with no idea who he was or where or how he might be.

And his first impressions were worse than depressing: having jerked upright he took one panicked gander at all that thickened nonexistence, then (perhaps understandably) let loose a crinkled cacophony of simultaneous screams, scrambled heaving to his fanned-out feet, and sprinted inkily into the shineless blackness, sweating hells individual as snowflakes as he ran and ran and ran—that teenagish god not running away or toward anything, but just running, whipped by a poison-thorned pain whose origins were opaque and thus all the more panic-imparting. Crying in stereo and shrieking in choir, he slapfooted in overlapping multiples and rip-rip-ripped at his soggy skins and might have tribulated on forever if he hadn’t stubbed one toe-web on a particularly dense patch of void and slammed, still ululating, into the congealed nothingness.

Ow-wow! ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ had faceplanted his astral skull, which curtly burgeoned into the midnightful Tree of Death and then collapsed back into his snot-globbed physiognomy—whereupon that lonely and luckless Loki, cranium aching, gave lachrymose vent to much sniffling and long-winded muttering about how badly he was a-hurting, and what a clumsy clot he was for injuring himself in such an easily avertable fall, and h-h-how maybe, he mused, to be harsh but honest maybe he deserved to get hurt and should just stop fucking whinging already, dolt! Against this he retorted in a basso profundo, then a squeako falsetto, quickly building into a fly-swarm concourseful of ragged babble, until he was haranguing himself with hundreds of voices all howling unholistically, each self excoriating itself and the others with sickly grinning shagreens of chagrin. Oh, shit: this teenagish god had been created pre-shattered, center-split, serratedly super-schizo, with thousands of wiggling fingent personalities always skull-bonking one another for supremacy, and this, his inaugural freak-out—the first of so, so many—only ended when in desperation he knapped out a sliver of obsidian void and drove it straight into his spirit’s salvatella.

Bleeding red-dwarf stars he felt weaker, and so more peaceful, subsiding into an aural nest of snarls. Gradually drooping below his own knees, the helter-skelterous ċħĭļđ, all twelve vices oozing through him like resorbed teratomas, pondered through tainted tears and with recoiled tongue his sinbetweenness, how he was Ьσțђ one and many, united in division like the lamping amphiboly of a hebephrenic’s nightmare. He was everybody and nobody, and what did he know? Nothing! Or, well, no not nothing, the nauseating nocturnal emission hiss-whispered to his slubbery selves—he knew at least that this, whatever this was, sucked. It was all very shit, and so was he, oh yes, all his selves slithered with awfulity, he was a batch of bitches, a bandersnatch of trash, and he had done something direly wrong, something irrevocable and unforgivable, which ruined everything forever and made him want to cry so bad, man—except, the not-exactly-funny-thing was, he could neither remember nor imagine what his crime might have been, since there was nothing and no one else to abuse.

No one else? The sniveling, shambling, and side-slouched teen spirit scratched at his subfusc tits savagely, recalling the anarchic rabble of arguments he’d just suffered under. If he had wronged someone, then he must have wronged himself. Which, uh, put him in a tickly pickle of a virtue vice. It was a moral finger trap: if he was both criminal and victim, then how could he ever forgive himself in good conscience? No matter what, he would be serving himself; he would be evil. Yet… why not be evil, jiggery-pokery and gleeful? Briefly he struggled to lift from his brain’s shoulders the krakenish tentacle of guilty morality—but then gave up and withered bewildered into seedy shame and self-despisal. Yucky yucko, he was so, so shitty, so incorrectably uncopacetic, and such a weird, revoltingly bad… a bad… Wait, what was he, anyway? Hm.

Riddling himself to pieces, Kid Itch stumped along and mumbled a sour mash of self-hexes until finally the broad implications of his seeming situation broke free and swam factly across his perplexed prospect. Flopping to a stop he stood still as wood—his selves closing like a slow-motion spring, vacillating in stonedy syncopation—gripped his pimple-tipped chin and fought his thoughts.

Fact: there was nothing but nothingness and nobody but him, just the darkness around and the darkness inside.

F-f-fact: somebody must have created all this.

F-f-f-f-f-fact: only onebody could currently be located: he him he he he, his own himself, that same multiplied fraction of manic factions chasing this crooked conga-line of logic, this colonnade of facts which supported just one possible entablature of cuh-cuh-cuh-conclusion—

That he, ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ, was GOD HIMSELF.

This electric epiphany erupting in marquee majuscules set off inside him a bowel-blistering discharge of arsenical happiness, while several megatons of wonder detonated in a supyrotechnic skyburst inside his suddenly translucent-haired teen-boy-head. Was he not so stupid then, possibly? Was he not an altogether unalleviated waste? He laughed staphly, smiling like an oxidized nailfile. Suddenly awestruck by admiration for his own amazing abilities, he attempted to remember his glorious and powerful act of creation………

Uhh but hell, even if for some weird reason he couldn’t remember his first act, well then his primal achievement was all the more astounding, he scolded his quaking egos—astounding because of how effortlessly and even unconsciously he’d projectile-ejected all this ebony emptiness with its endless lessness.

And y’know, come to contemplate it, maybe he’d been prematurely harsh on this hull of lulls. Looking around now at all the charred vacancy of form, he couldn’t help feeling that for an amateurish cosmoron, he hadn’t done such a shoddy job. His aesthetics of ejectamenta weren’t total trash. Call the black a nihilist effigy of meaninglessness. Call it a pointedly pointless protest and jury-rigged transfiguration of his pain, he cajoled his selves, succeeding at calming his colors to a varicolored collage of ochres, his prechemical slop of sinny selves beginning to iridesce with a fish-scale sheen of conceit. He is a shard, existence is a shard, the shard is father of the hole—so call him a shartist.

Overbuoyed, ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ celebrated in his most adolescent mode, capering unibrowed with a scrilly-scrolly stache and a dark dunce-cap beret and over his bony shoulder a giant tar-tipped paintbrush which gushed thick gobs of lukewarm darkness into the anthracite mist while he, with no conscious idea of where he’d pirated these tropes from, danced and pranced and chanted nincompoopish nonsense like “haha-hallelujah!” and “I am that I am that I—”

But there he broke off, spluttered and flamed up like a sable ember, having been socked by the mother bomb of all ideas, an incandescent concept which clouted his pubescentesque essence with such boiling, brilliant joy that in his naive ecstasy he almost fused into one luminous nucleus, almost liquefied and disintegrated under the superwhelming beauty of his most recent logical leap of faith. Whoa, yo yo whoa, wait just a weedwhacked minute, he’d squawked to his selves—if there was no one else to make him, then

he had made himself

he reasoned rather reasonably. Sheeeeet!

Ugly, unclean, urticating and unutterable he might be, but he, he, HE was an unbegotten self-bastard, an ur-mighty and unique usurper of the unformed who had willed his selves onto the unscene as easy as falling awake and then, without pausing to hem or haw, immediately made the most dramatic artistic statement thinkable, i.e. himself in emptiness, dark in dark on dark!

Exultant, the maxipack of garbled godlings spun on one heel, wobbling out his reedy arms, then saluted himself elbowfully, clicking his stingray-heels together while his overlapping faces fluctuated through protean variations on vainglory. Sir Adamantine Mugwump! he felicitated himself out loud. Sir Slap-Happy Leveret! Sir Caravanserai of Self-Rescinding Nullifidians!

But the cumbersome formulations echoed and came back all changed, full of holes, bombarding him with himself, hammering him with his own cracked cries of self-hype, with the cold brass proof of his crass and brash pathetitude. ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ hesitated chastened. Self-seeded or not, he sounded like a pretentious git. He sounded ridiculous, and really he had to acknowledge that—notwithstanding his expeditious ascent to the rank of omniarch and latter staccato gasps of half-happiness, half-madness—that he still actually could not bring himself to like his stratified selves very much, and that moreunder, all his superficial ways of self-praising were just a desperate weasel to trick himself into feeling fractionally less fruity. Like, okay maybe he was talented—but never forget that he was also super cunting annoying (ugh!) and needed to learn when to shut up. Fucking un-bear-a-BLE! AUGH!

Craning and elongating his collapsible neck, our Lord his Charcoal Phosphorescence the First indulged in a deafening series of what sounded like melancholy loon calls yodeled by a weeping chainsaw.

Even mid-caterwaul, however, he remained cursed with all-discerning alertness (or so he thought of it), and his fevered mind raced like a lit fuse toward its own nitroglycerical devastation. Foreclusion: using pain as material, he had made himself not a calabashedly cool cad, but an agonized, doubt-ridden pile of pricks. Proclusion: in one suspiration he had both created and destroyed himself, dooming himself before he could ever boom.

Which hadn’t been a very clever idea, had it. Neither intelligent nor nice. Stupid, cruel, and tyrannical infactical. Judging by how he treated himself, he was uh what a munificent nomenclator might dub a putrid drip—a living sin. Which meant… which meant, um… and now, throwing one taloned hand over his eyes and blinking against an internal sunstorm of lucidity, the alleged alpha adept espied the rising point toward which his card-mahal of clusions was tending—the upended bottom of his inverted pyramid of unfulfillment—and he shatter-cried out as if dying and then twisted violently into himself, his stomach punching his face as he power-screamed into his coal bowels.

He had perceived the ouroboric truth about himself, the serpent knot that could not be unpicked. See, and hear, and be grave: the mysterious atrocity he’d committed, his unforgivable sin against himself, had been…

Had been his self-creation.

His sublime violation was himself, and now he would have to live with the consequences forevermore.

In slime and in misery, disunited.

No ha ha. Ha no. Tittering sickly, the sterile lapsarian trudged momentarily yammerless through protonic mud… Ha hmmm ummm errrrr, he coughed to himself, hold on a haptosecond: he wasn’t getting off that easily. Hark up: had he just been proud of making himself? Wha-wha-what pretension! What pomposity! Goddamnit he hated himself so much! And he flumed his selves down into fundamental muck, cringing under the blows of his own mocking, smacking hiss-laughs, the tattlecries of battalions of self-batterment snapping mordacious pennons of murderous persiflage till he vobbled on the verge of vomiting from the fetid Pride behind every smellement of his me-ing. Okay schmokay, he snarled into the gnarled nothing, okay so what if he’d created himself—here was an ineludible truth: an axiomus maximus: he. was. SHIT.

Oh my dear smeared Reader, have you guessed where this ends? He had only one mental maneuver left to make before his fatalest mistakest. See there the frightsome infant Erebus sitting bespattered in permanent mud, his eyes growling. Poor kid had been universally rejected, just never had a chance, even though like anybody else all he wanted was to feel okay about himself. Too bad he didn’t understand this, too too bad he would cope in precisely the worst way possible, oo oo oo bad that he was about to duke up and defend himself against himself with such devastating fury. Fuck it, he might be low-class trash, he sissed, but was he a coward? A layabout? No! Gathering his selves, clutching his tatters of soiled second-hand spirit, the self-appointed emperor drew himself up proudly. He might be filthy, but he was the goddamned fucking self-creator, he could do what he bloody wanted, and ain’t nobody was gonna stop ‘im, BITCH, cuz even if he wuz the worst evah, he also happened ta be tha rampant champion creator, slayer of haters, and he could prove all low opinions of him wrong, could show them all simply by making a crazy fucking utopia, the bestest creation evah. Shit… Shit! His world was gonna be so dope. His world would be the frickin’ bomb, he smugged, wallowing in the special self-sucking narcissism particular to the type of insecure god who will go on to create numberless hosts of angels and humans whose life mission is to praise him at the peaks of their lungs eternally or else be cast into fiery pits of pus, what?

You understand, don’t you? ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ was about to create our universe. He is our malicious Lord, and we are at his most limited mercy.

34 – THE RAINBOW OF REDEMPTION

Anke, still gripping me like a teddy bear, had fallen into wide-eyed muteness. Both of us stared moonstruck at Norea—but only I was drooling. Though I couldn’t follow the yeasty priestess, she was packing my skull full of lurid images and ideas while the bruised ridges of my cerebrum inflated from inflammation, uncrinkled and lost their imprints, then sagged, new wrinkles pouring into place and craqueluring my consciousness with ill crotchets, fretly intricating around the robust priestess, circling into her as she spoke with elaborate hand gestures that seemed precisely illustrative and yet had no obvious meaning, mudras shadowplaying the Platonic types preflected in her speech.

Steepling her stodgy fingers into a meat cathedral atop the oak table, Norea—who truly did believe in herself with neither doubt nor shame, who lived the cause and knew it, morally lambent and intellectly lucent—had just laughed with easy-breezy eudemonia and acknowledged that Anke looked a tidge uncomfortable at the turn the story had taken. But you heard me right, she said fiercely yet somehow reassuringly. ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ is the Abrahamic God, whose weepy, self-hating worshippers have been hoodwinked. A toxic microcosm of the All, he certainly did not create us through a majestic efflux of perfect will. Nor did he design our universe as an ingenious device to sieve the good souls from the evil. No, he made this world as a ridiculous artistic argument shoring up the fragments of his eroded ego against the ravaging gravity waves of his intergalactic inferiority issues. Consider the Garden of Eden afresh: it is clearly an F-graded lack-brain’s satirical utopia—a clumsy, crayon-lined playcourt where carnivores gnawed artichokes, all hues loomed lurid as a children’s illustration, and obedience was policely guaranteed by the tyrant’s roving eye.

And even the mislead mainstream Abrahamites gnow that the Garden fell apart. At first, like any common idiot, ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ thumped his own backs and stumpled around marveling at being a shartist in his shard—but ere long he became accustomed to the colors he’d used, then criticized the construction, then carped, cavilled, cut, and recalibrated, soon broken-heartedly copped to the rudimentariness of his vision, grew viciously bored of the pet angels wassailing him; started to suffer again, to whine, to wheel, to flail, to belabor his labor; had even begun to ask whether self-destruction was a metaphysically possible plus not-too-painful option for a self-creator; had flung himself in comminuting sludge, his morphing physiognomies striped with a travesty of tears—when suddenly amid the mire—across his Mind—there flickered an image…: a slime-streaked fuzz of aching enigma…: a corrupted shot of incorruptible beauty! Our God had glimpsed the way out, haloed in divine light!

Oh yeah: he’d make a total babe. He’d create a callipygian companion, a primeval woman more stimulating in her feral untamedness than all the rest of creation wadded up and punted into a supervolcano. And she (omg, omg) would be in love with him!! Yow!!! He’d design her to have free will, yet her natural needs would oh-so-conveniently be like a lock aching for his key, yo! She would find him funny, and clever, and fascinating, and wonderful, and just like super-crazy-intelligent, she would ooh and aah, celebrate and worship at his septentrional spade-feet. Dude, Eve was gonna be siiiiiiiick!

Listen, Norea commanded my muffled mother. Listen and keep your husband in mind, when I say (she said) that our God’s goal has always been his own salvation. He tried to save himself through the External, through Art, through Eve, through any potential route except the one where he tamed his stormy selves and reined in his galloping feelings. Yes, he honestly believed that if Eve loved him, he would instantly shed all his pain and feel confident and happy evermore. Her love would permanently solve all his problems always.

Well. The newly created Eve did love ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ, with her sky-wide heart open as the prairies, but her love was the primal, primary-colored adoration of a child for her magic Pa, and could never have plugged the self-created hole in his hamfisted heart. While Eve, an overgrown woman blameless as a lamb, skipped to and fro singing, gaga over the Garden, or rolled with laughter holding her feet, ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ watched her with the slitted eyes and faked smile of one of his wormier, serpent-tongued personalities, fuming testicular vortices of apocrinal steam. Man like he just did not believe in her love, like at all. She loved him cuz she didn’t know him. She loved him cuz she was stupid.

Dissatisfied, dissecure, and disloved, the splittered God began to blame Eve for his long insufflations of suffering. Bluntly put, he oughta wipe out that stupid bitch and start over, he ranted to his angels, except somehow he couldn’t bring himself to erase her. Behind the fake sage face he’d adopted for Eve, his internal saints were waging an anti-ochlocratic war of suppression against his sinnier selves, wielding the venom-smeared weapons of shame and guilt against his goblinoid urges to hurt and murder, against his ogrish need to revenge his wounded ego… yet shame and guilt, in such a creature, only crank up the discomfort for everybody. A guilty criminal is the most agonizing kind, for he can’t kill or maim or deceive blithely, but rather, oppressed by neverstop thought, hesitates perpetually on the cusp of crime, excruciating everyone with his indecision. Such a creature, who acts only in breakdown or psychosis, commits his crime to prove others’ low opinions of him, takes revenge for how he feels about how they feel, lashes & thrashes all out of proportion.

Very long story very short, we can say that Eve’s apple-led revelation of the universe—her awakening to self-definition, knowledge, and awareness more fecund and profuse than her pa could apprehend—upset him, as he watched from afar; that her new gnosis propelled the malevolent master of our universe facesfirst through a nerve-bursting barrage of muscularly hypostasized vices; and that when Eve embraced Adam and whispered her new understanding, ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ failed: he wailed: he splintered with fissures: he firestormed the Garden of Eden, mutilated the first man, and revenged himself on the first woman, who’d hurt him merely by thinking for herself and preferring someone else. Our Eve, she was a victim and so retained her moral purity—but this sin of God, the Original Sin, was so odious, so pernicious, that it nearly irreversibly polluted our universe’s male principle, with everlasting consequences for everyone ever. Indeed, some thinkers have posited that we can trace back to the splintered godling’s blitz all snap-trap male vanity, all thin-skin male aggression, all murder-boar male war. Other thinkers have other ideas…

Whatever the case, we can be thankful that the Father of Assault did not quite survive his own sin. At the zenith of his frenzy, lixiviated by vexation and pummeled by pride, he fractured into incendiary halves & quarters & eighths, then in a great spastic sequence of pointillist slaps ejaculated his minds, dissolved with a foul howl and emanated himself as a honking flood of sterile egos into Eve’s womb. He died then, in a way—but lives on in his gibbering offspring. Infected with his parasitic seeds, Eve would rip birth for six days and nights, enduring the earthquakous pangs of the original mother while from her womb scrambled a teeming tangle of spirits, gods, heroes, and pop characters, tiers of faces from books, movies and politics, churches and states, woods and moors and moons, an ensemble cast of ensemble casts swarming like emperor bees—all the archetypes, prototypes and post-types who populate our human world, daily manipulating our loves, loyalties, and livelihoods.

The incompletely pluralized god may no longer be a coherent being, but through his schizoid selves he continues to play out his eternal drama of self-war, working in the medium of suffering, serving as cruel impresario for the trillions of tales of our doomed and transient lives.

Thus every day empties us: we are haunted, cornered, slaughtered by the anxiously crackling echoes of the dissociated Creator, whose selves wage war through entire ethnicities and religions, burping out plagues while he clashes together civilizations like colossal toys for processing meat.

֍֍֍

You’d think Anke would’ve collapsed when Norea confirmed the bad news, as many a wither-wristed congregant would collapse in the sermons to come. But back then Norea hadn’t yet asceticized herself into a cold living diagram of the astral plane, was still matronishly full and comfortingly solid, with a lined, sandy forehead beaded by unpretentious sweat; and though darkly striated rims corrugated her brow and bracketed her squashy nose and middle-aged mouth, all the same her eyes were assegais and her posture a battle-formation, and her vigorous presence imparted, as ever, both terror and courage.

Yet predominantly courage, and more and more so as she turned and stirred her oration up toward the Temple’s most sacred and beautiful mission, an enheartening and wonderful campaign instigated, she said, by our progenitrix, Holy Mother Eve, to save us all—to open a path of escape—to grant us a chance, however partial, of escaping the ravaging vagaries of this rigged Phlegethon.

See, though many years had to elapse, Eve made a splendid recovery from her harpoonish wounds and father-fed phobias. In this she was aided in no small part by Adam—patient and loving Adam, that seldom exemplar of the best in man, who nursed her with a solicitude that can only be described as unlikelily exquisite. And even if in later years he did occasionally act erratic, semi-enlightened, or lunatically inboozulated, well… no man is perfect, and anyway Eve, having lost her innocence, and facing her life sentence in the post-garden hellscape, simply had to toughen up, grow brisk and forceful, learn how to deal with him and establish her right to exist and feel. Get this straight: Eve was no stale sidekick, no sucker-cup doormat! Maturing into a wise and kind warrior-shepherdess, she lived twelve hundred years, invented a plethora of tools and philosophies, and with a tongue sharp as an awl instructed most of her daughters and a few outstanding sons in cosmic wisdom. On her deathbed she signed the charter for the first Temple in the Wasteland, then bequeathed to her best descendants three secret scriptures which contained her story and special gnosis—for after her last night in the garden, having drunk deep of apple wisdom, Eve had glimpsed the Way Out, had discovered universal salvation. The knowledge she passed down could save us all—even ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ—forever.

Sadly, the sacred labor of her fruits, and the joyful center of worship they founded, were eventually destroyed by the patriarchy and erased from history.

That is, until the year 166 B.C.

In that fateful year the Seleucid king Antiochus IV, who controlled Jerusalem, attempted to crush the Jewish culture and Hellenize their worship. As a result, anti-Hellenic attitudes soon took root among the Jewish populace at large, and amid the sputtering rebellion an elite conventicle of grecophilic patriarchs decided to secretly relocate their much-valued library of esoteric and forbidden writing. During the transport, however, they made a mistake—the mistake that may rescue all humanity. It happened quite casually too, when one of the more hapless patriarchs dozed off after dinner, providing an opportunity for his youthful daughter, a cunning but innocent maiden, to riffle his bag for treats. Instead of wrapped honeycake she found a bundle of codices her father was smuggling, among them a book called The Secret Gospel of Eve. After scanning just a few of its pages, the no-longer-innocent girl groaned in ecstatic pain; her mind was rudely expanding, ripping past everything her father’d taught her. She glanced around wildly, then bounced away like a frightened rabbit.

Sobbing pretty much nonstop, the young already-post-Jewish renegadess stole the codex and fled her hometown for a remote desert locale, where she posed as a male farmer while she studied Eve’s triad of texts. What she learned from their pages would subterraneanly shape the millennium to come.

Norea, drawing herself up straight as a mythological tower above the gloomy pea-soup of the churlish world, bridged and wrapped us with warm steel cables of reassurance, bidding us to take heart, be brave and unbitter. There was bad news; there was good news. All too clearly, evil pervades everything… we are trapped on the Demiurge’s earth, at the mercy of his narcissistic selves—but don’t believe for a minute that Sophia’s screw-up went unnoticed by the Trinity! You think those protectors, beings of pure joy, would ever let our pain reverberate without a meaning? Honey, no! Behind the drapery of reality, the Aeon of Barbara and Cosmic Daughter Zoë have been racing since Fall Zero to contain the damage, engineer Sophia’s escape, and save the universe itself!

Here, for only your ears, is the secret key—whose nibs and nubs form a soundwave, for this key is composed of words: listen: as ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ belched the breath of life into Eve, the Aeon of Barbara had blown Sophia’s essence through his eructation and perfused Eve with Sophia’s spirit. Thus was created human nature—a gust of divine spirit miasmatized with material corruption.

If a person squanders her lifespan, then upon death her squalid spirit will be sucked down with its corruption, to be either annihilated as unworthy, or spit up for another heady, upsetting spin through our murky universe.

However, if the person purifies her corruption, then upon death her pristine spirit soars up to rejoin perfect fullness. Her spirit is immortal, has perfect gnosis and integral existence, and dwells jubilating forever in glorious euphoria, hum-buzzing at one in the great shining eye of allness known as the Depth.

…or so Eve had indited, before the patriarchs murdered her heirs, torched her temples, and imposed a male ideology based on bewildered quasi-holy books that they themselves did not understand. Yet our mitochondrial mum had been so bold as to predict this testosteronal tragedy, in a secret coda to her third scripture—where she also prophesied the eventual resurrection of her salvation station, in an evangelical revival carried out by a solo valkyrie who would discover Eve’s scriptures and then reignite the rebellion against the eerie chimaera in the world’s mirror. But that valkyrie was yet to be born.

The patriarch’s maverick daughter, studying Eve’s vatications in the taboo codex, could not fail to recognize her required role—her fate. Sewing for herself a cowled goddess robe, she embarked on an artemisian pilgrimage through nearby kingdoms, hunting down and preaching to those few who had ears to hear. Town by town, spirit by spirit, the precocious priestess assembled around herself a plucky band of twelve faithful retainers, the heaven-hungry cohort of women who would form the legendary first congregation of the second Temple in the Wasteland. Together they constructed a phantasmagoric commune out in the strangest precincts of the deepest desert; together they lived, laughed, fought and loved in an unearthly oasis which the former daughter helmed more or less harmoniously for nearly ninety years of aggressive blessedness.

Neither did her legacy end with her death. Assuming the name Norea, she grounded a lineage of same-named priestesses who have continued down to the present. Over the last millennia, this subterfugitive matriarchy has ensured the survival of Eve’s teachings, persevering through the malest of ages, so that one day some woman might complete the work of time, overcome this vile universe, and cast it down disintegrating into the garbage dump of eternity.

And that’s not all, about the All, at all. For here is the super-secret key set in the shaft of the first secret key: hear: the clean-scoured spirit, by saving itself, also saves everybody else. Each disinfected spirit—each corrupticule cleansed—salvages one more part of Sophia. Slowly but unstoppably, Sophia is being ferried to the light! Yes, my love, hark: humans are the illusion-trammeled troopers of the fullness. We, even mugged by the smog of materiality, even lured by the maya of our lives, even convinced of our deficiencies and nullish nonsignificance, always play a role in the cosmic struggle, Eve taught. Castaways on the beach of reality, we are given a dichotomous choice: just one way down, and one way up: we shrivel in unspeakable suffering—or, rising, we purify our spirits as part of the personal yet apocalyptic battle staging itself through our generations, the humanity-wide eschatological mission unfurling down across the crucigerous and lunulated tapestry of blood known as world history. All true hearts live for this ultimate mission: to redeem Sophia.

35 – LAUGHING GLASS WOMAN

“You must never forget, Anke, that the Aeon of Barbara mothers us from afar, and that Zoë has descended throughout history to give us guidance and light. We are also intermittently blessed by the Eleven Virtues, though naturally the twelfth virtue, Wisdom, especially flickers in and out, as we suffer the confusion of a nightmare, sleepwalkers smashing into every wall on the way.”

“Okay, but… I still don’t get what this has to do with me. At the beginning you said you’d explain everything that happened. But where were the bear and the cat? Is Sophia’s situation supposed to be like mine? Is Eve’s? Or you know what… can, can I just use your telephone? I don’t even know what time it is!”

“You want a moral of the story? There’s several, and they are all relevant to you. One moral might be that the foundational act of all history was an act of male violence against a woman. And that this explosive closure of Paradise, this Fall of God and Original Sin, has set the tone for all existence ever since… Naturally, I don’t mean to condemn every male who has ever lived, since they too can purify themselves and become immortal. I don’t even necessarily mean to draw parallels to the behavior of your husband—though in this case the parallels do draw themselves, Love. Still, I’m sure he’s not especially bad. Males are not necessarily bad… yet… who starts the wars? Who drives the machines of oppression? Who commits the vast majority of sexual violence? A stranger of which sex, would you be quicker to trust with your life? Anke, your problems with your husband are only a microcosm of almost all relationships between normal men and normal women. You have been oppressed, and you have welcomed your oppression. You have sacrificed yourself on the altar of a man, though you’re magnitudes more kind, sensitive, and alive than he will ever be.”

“None of this is true! Excuse me, but you don’t know Marty. You don’t know him or me! Our relationship is good! Mostly he’s so tender! He does so much for us!! He works so hard!!! Every day he goes out there, and he fights for us… and I know I can be a lot to deal with… and he’s under so much stress!”

“Of course he is. And so are you, with all the unpaid labor you’ve been doing, in all your loneliness and isolation. But do you lash out at him?”

“In my own way—yes! I’m not perfect! Listen, Marty is great. He is my soulmate! When you were telling your story, I thought about how much he was like Adam, taking care of Eve. I love him, like Eve loved Adam.”

“Adam’s not the only character your husband resembles. You should understand that most men have significant elements of ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ (and the Depth), just as most women take after Eve, Sophia, and Barbara.”

“How is Marty like ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ?”

“…Look in your heart.”

“You mean—? No! Marty never did anything like that. Never!”

“Never? What if you just didn’t see it that way? What if you had a completely other idea of what was going on, and no respect for your own integrity, just wanting to be liked? To be loved? How much older is he, again?”

“Marty is my husband.”

“Precisely. Even if he never did anything outrageous, the old-fashioned man-woman, ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ-Eve relationship is baked into the contract, dominant to submissive, the big strong man with the admiring woman at his foot, atop a pile of plunder, his phallic sword dripping with the blood of his enemies.”

“It’s just not like that. I don’t know anybody like that. My mother and father aren’t like that. …And what about Stefsie? You’d say all this about him?”

“No. He’s a baby. The question is what he will become. But Anke, I don’t mean to attack your husband except insofar as he hurt you for no reason, when all you wanted was comfort. Ultimately, Martin is a victim of this world like everyone else. And this world rots people. It torments. It destroys. That’s another moral of the story I told… In the Gospel of Thomas, the Lord said, ‘He who understands the world has found a corpse, and the world is not worthy of him who has found a corpse.’ In the Gospel of Phillip, we find: ‘God is a man-eater, and so humans are sacrificed to him. This world eats the dead, and everything eaten in this world also dies. But truth eats life, and no one fed on truth will die.’ How does that make you feel? Is it not heartachingly beautiful?”

“Honestly, it’s mostly just scary. Why have I never heard of these gospels?”

“Because they didn’t want you to.”

“…They?”

“Anke, ask any Catholic or Protestant why evil exists. With a straight face, believing his own bull, he’ll say that a benevolent creator set up this neverending carnage in order to sift out the good souls. Apparently, all our suffering is necessary to test our use of free will. Think about that claim: so that the blessed may go to Heaven, children get burned in ovens, the poor remain hungry and downtrodden, the same ungodly, bloody families rule with iron gauntlets for millennia, and ethnic groups get subjected to genocide—but for some reason the good angels hide, and the good God doesn’t appear. And somehow we only have ourselves to blame for his silence. Now, does that make any sense? Any at all? Buttonhole your average evangelist on the agony of babies, and he’ll shrug and handwave at the Mystery of God’s Plan. The world is good, somehow he just knows it, but like Job he cannot explain why. Hah! There’s a much simpler answer to all this—and I see in your face that you know what I mean. I saw it in the story of your life. You know the world is evil… But by the way, does your baby always stare this much? I don’t mean to interrupt our conversation, but wow, I have just never seen anything like it. Never saw a look like that, on the face of a one-year-old. Like he’s somehow, I don’t know, actually listening.”

“You’re not the first one to say that! Everyone who meets him sees he’s special. Like Marty says, Stefsie doesn’t crawl, he explores. And I have to be sooo careful with my feelings, he picks up on every little thing and magnifies it by 1000… So, maybe he does understand. It’s true he’s staring at you closely. (I’m just glad he feels all right.) He seems to like you… or at least find you funny.”

“For sure, Anke, for sure. Otherwise why would he laugh like… that… But going back to the topic at hand. Let me ask you something. Haven’t you always felt you don’t belong here? That you’re part of a higher, more beautiful world? That somehow this life can’t really be your real life? Time is elapsing without the vital mystery being solved, the years draining into a bucket?”

“…I think lots of people feel like that.”

“Not everybody. But they’d be right.”

“Norea, you’ve been amazingly nice to me, and you’ve helped me out a lot, and I would rather not offend you… but this is all really far out, and sounds a little bit crazy to me. And, and I love my husband, and you should understand that. And he loves me! And, I still have no clue how any of this has anything to do with my death experience, or who the bear and cat are, or—"

“The bear and cat are easy to explain. They are Elohim and Yahweh, dualistic twin gods worshipped by the predecessors of the ancient Hebrews. Elohim grants boons and helps us cut through knots, whereas Yahweh does all he can to thwart, torment, and disappoint us.”

“Our cat was… Yahweh? The Jewish God?”

“Sort of—but you’re thinking of a different Yahweh, rather than one of the original animal deities of the Hebrews enslaved in Egypt. Later the free tribes would switch their loyalties to a daddy dominator also called Yahweh, with a wife named Asherah. Later still the priests read Plato and settled on the monotheistic drivel we’re all so familiar with today… but that’s a whole other sermon, and we don’t have time. Before we go I’ll give you a copy of the Nag Hammadi—think of it as the Rainbow Bible. Of course, one has to read it selectively, sieving out the propaganda, but it will explain to you everything. You’ll see… Oh! And make sure that you don’t take the Norea in that book too seriously. She’s a mythologized version of the founder of the Second Temple.”

“…Can I have a copy of The Secret Gospel of Eve?”

“No. At least, not yet.”

“Hm. You know… when I was standing outside, looking at the cross, I felt so sure that everything had a hidden meaning. It seemed like I was sent here. But your church is strange, I don’t know. This is all your thing. Not my thing, I think. I’m so confused. A bear isn’t a dog. And the cat—”

“In terms of symbolism, a bear is close to a dog. Goofy is simply one of the good sides of the evil god. His goodness is real, but he’s only one of millions of gods.”

“What if the cat was just a cat? What if it was all a coincidence?”

“A coincidence? What a heap of unlikelihoods that would be! Your vision? Your meeting God in both his ursine/canine and feline incarnations?”

“I should probably admit that I am Lutheran.”

“What about the homeless man? When you described him taking on voices, he reminded me of ĊħĭļđőЬσțђ himself—which I will have to investigate. But already it’s clear that the diamond he demanded, far from being your quartz earring, was metaphorical. It was the diamond of your special spirit, that he wanted to take from you. As for the death of your cat… Didn’t you ask yourself how strange it was that an ice-cream truck was driving along in a rainstorm on a cold spring day, driven by a man in all white who looked like Jesus?”

“But what does it all mean?”

“What’s it mean? That’s a good question, a big question, a possibly world-historically significant question, and one that I mean to investigate with all my heart and mind and tools. Right now I cannot tell you what it all means. I don’t deeply know who you are, or why destiny has chosen you, or what is going to happen next. Yet I know at least one thing. I know that today’s events were meant to bring you here to me, to this meeting and your spiritual awakening.”

“All right. I guess I do have one other question.”

“Ask away, Love.”

“In your opinion, was I right there’s no Hell?”

“…Oh, no. There’s Hell. There’s even a Bible of Hell.”

“There is?”

“Yes, and trust me, you don’t want to hear about it yet. Take comfort in the fact that most people who die without purifying their spirit just get destroyed, and are reabsorbed back into the raw material of our cursed universe.”

“W-why should I take comfort in that? How bad is Hell?”

“Anke, we’ll discuss that another time. It’s a hard topic, and anyway the congregants will start to arrive soon. I need to drive you back home. But first, why don’t we offer up a short prayer? Just let me pull back this curtain…”

“Oh my god, I thought that covered a window. What’s it say underneath?”

“The Crucifiction.”

“Wait, that is Jesus?”

“Yes and no.”

“But it’s a woman!”

“We call her Zoësus. Or Shesus, but that’s mostly a joke. Unlike the fig-kicking, testosteronal tyrant of the Gospel of Mark, Zoësus has a sense of humor.”

“But why is she made out of glass?”

“Her body wasn’t real. Lots of ancient authorities knew this. There’s even a letter in the New Testament, 1 John, written explicitly to deny that ‘heresy.’”

“…And why is she laughing?”

“Laughter was the appropriate reaction. After all, she wasn’t hurt. She suffered only in their eyes. They nailed their woman to their death, while she laughed from on high at their ignorance. The Romans were a joke. The nails were a joke. The betrayal of Judas, another joke. Death itself is a joke, though to us unfunny. Anke, you too will learn to laugh. It will become the greatest weapon of your self-defense, as you turn into the woman you should have been all along. Zoësus will always help you at every step—and so will we. We’ll be there for you! You’re one of us now, and we care for one another, day or night, summer or winter, youth or age. You’re not alone anymore… Starting today, your life will change. You’ll finally begin to understand yourself. For the first time, your pain will make sense to you. Please, will you attend on Sunday?”

“Sorry, it’s just too far from home. I don’t even know where we are.”

“I’ll pick you up personally. My love, we need you. We need you… It’s fine, you don’t have to agree now, just think about it tonight... First, however, I want you to try something. I want you to close your eyes and picture what you most desire. No, I mean it, please. Picture it. What do you want most of all? For you? For your life? What do you desire in your heart? Now, ask Zoësus for it.”

Really, Anke said to herself, she already had everything she wanted, didn’t she? (Except to be home in her warm bed…) Really it was Marty, ever-suffering Marty, who needed divine intervention. He so badly wanted to be his own boss; to make his own work always and sell it for the money he deserved; to be recognized, and admired, and loved, for his tall, tall talent. To succeed at long last.

Anke sealed her eyes and gingerly began to pray, though pointedly not at the obsidian cross with its laughing glass woman.

36 – TIMESPACELOVEHATE

Ah my dear lil doggie, we’ve come so far together… *sniff* *sniff*, *honk* *honk*… and I know you wish my nebulous fabulizing would never end; I know you rub my wet words all over your body, mud-bathing sparrowly in the pleasance of my presence, choking at my jokes and keeping my every jeweled weeping for the treasury of your memory. We’ve been having a swollen time, a perking pixie epoch, and indeed you’ve binned all your other authors cuz you no longer need those potato-sack also-rans. You just need me, meeee, and no one but me: Willy Wonka Lucifer Clown, starring in a Sclerotic Society of Rickety Chickennecks. It would be so empty, without my plunderphonics!

And so but in order to celebrate our bond—in favor of festschrifting your love for me—(and plus since we’re already exploring authenticity and ressentiment)—I will come cleanly: I will temporize no more: I’ll tattle the dirty truth straight from the sloppy wet center of my godblasted soul: I’ll confess into your minigolfish scare-visage hovering above me: I’ll pull back my figurative bathrobe so you can strike me in the side with your oral spear of scorn, if you truly are in the mood to kill a man and only a man: so LISTEN: I am so-so sorry (my dearling dew! my largo haboob!) that I have bunted you away repeatedly, that I have shot at you through every window and kicked you out every door: yon rocky road of my rejection was but a misled detour to protect the fragile fundaments of my self-worth and -belief: I’ve been burned and frozen, pulverized and copperplated and queasily fauvated too many times before, ‘n’ now I don’t trust easy, dig: but the truth is—that I—I—I love you too. Augh!

Look at me. Look into my Bambi eyes infected with wet affection. See how my mustache smiles into a veiny S, how my lips form a thick W. See how the burnished antique coin pendent from my neck reflects your face in dark light, and is lashed by the splashes of mammoth teardrops which have left glistening expressways down my toughly tender phiz. I just can’t help it: Reader, when you pay attention to me, I get a serotonin supernova so intense I end up exhausted from pleasure. Around you my head is a tesla orb, my spine a lightning rod, and I feel like Keatsie’s Cortez as he saw the Pacific, like Mario with a fire flower, like a ruderal macaroni yodeling Yankee Doodle. Sometimes my love for you feels like lamplight, other times it feels like hard white light and brings tears to my ears and makes everything so real. With you in the picture, well—the picture starts moving and turns into a movie, and life seems livable at last. And somehow, my deer heart, somehow you feel the same! Might as well face it: you and I, we really do have something special, don’t we? So, uh… like, why dontcha scootch ya tush over here, under this cozy burlap blanket? It’s much warmer next to my… body… Oh, yes… Mmmmmm… MMMMMMM……

…Wheeeew. I think I need a cig. Ya want one? Don’t worry, it’s just candy, cuz a’course I’d never poison you. Quite the opposite! Now that we’ve wrung out our stiffness and our wrinkles, I wanna give you an unforgettable gift from my brain’s heart, I wanna prove with one big flourish that I care and look out for you and would do just about anything to make you happy, bb.

I’d do anything for you.

I’d even say goodbye now and finish this book on a more dramatic note, back in the wacky, head-slapping, and toxically hazardous world of my childhood.

So uh just slide back a little, maybe over there, okay? I need some room to gesture as I talk. And as for later, well, I’ll see you around, I suppose. Oh, and a little hint? You should, um, probably brush your teeth more often. Yup…

Okay, so right. Where was I? Oh yeah:

Norea and my mother, they’d been chitter-chattering intensely for some time—however, I had long since left.

But my time with them had been an unreally riled ride, and I had heard the unhearable, and I had lived death and I had died into life.

At first, as Norea spun her extrastellar saga, I had squinted bewildered through the jangling lavafalls in my ring-ring-ringing noggin, my facial mask segueing between comedy and tragedy while her spritzes of tonic syllables played a wetly percussive solo on my cymbalous tympana… but gradually the chaos codified, phonemes flew into syntax, phrases slatted into sentences, paragraphs shouldered palanquins of sense, and finally an orison-emblazoned parade of mystical script marched fifing into my soul. I began to understand after all. Somehow I’d been knocked back into my full mind, like a man whose dislocated knee gets fixed by another fall. My childhood had smashed wide. I was awakening.

Now my ears bounded up and twisted to catch Norea’s roundly resounding sounds, while the majestic circuits of her cadences, the blooming circumvolutions of her elocution, looped hoops around my pneuma. Giggling in awe, trapped in rapture, I heard-saw subquantal Gods committing obscene and geometrically ostentatious acts of meiosis and meosis; woman and man chased each other around the haunches of a tree, man hunting with spear, woman with net; the Great Chain of Being was unhooked by a cosmic bouncer, the emanations wheezed melodies like an accordion of infinities, and the heterogeny of Norea’s détourned creations, less comprehended than incarnated, spun in internecine warfare, speeding up into a whirling blur of massacrous hues above which the mystagoguess herself rose afoam, an ascendant pearlescent Prospera with scythes floating from her mouth, architectures of stars skating from the dizzying tunnel of light that was the stomach of her voice.

Thus I was pulled into orbit. Wallowing on a vortical wheel of vertigo I whipped around Norea’s squawking head epicyclically, and at every turn was divebombed by her dopplering proclamations, by limpid snatches of mythologems, streaked flares of astral motion, jeweled adjectives, amore chromatic. Her voice came from behind life, her oratory curled over the hill of eternity, choired by cherubs, echoing off clouds, crimping air into curls, and was the sole honeyflow of all the trillion trillion tributarial furbelows of time, a siren discourse that undulated through space, caught and wafted me, and tore me toward the empyrean. Stunned, stanned, stunted, astonied I could only laugh, for never had any rupture-of-consciousness more gorgeous poured through my gorges. Via Norea I was learning to love metaphysics, turning permanently up toward the supreme gaiety of the spinning mobile of the Gods, whose trans-sky supralife was so much brighter than the haunted grey eminence we call existence. Already my itchy fantasies of escape were gaining staircases and hallways to the infinite; and I began to transform—to fructimorph.

You heard me: my brain, pumped full under lank blond thatch, was bloating into a veiny double-apple, a seared flesh fruit shot full of hot starry quarrels, its meaty interstices flooding with a cinderous liquid script that burned Norea’s heaven’s lore ever deeper, flammaforming my lobes cell by cell by cell.

But concussion still moiled against conversion. Lower down, blackened floods of skull-celled blood burst through nervifolious cerebellar bulkheads, even as burning rollers of acid scripture broke into my core, burst into my spirit well, and deflagrated into stories furling within stories furling within stories, myths fractally mazing into the rose of intertextuality, a rose of rose of roses, a flame-leafed labyrinth of heavenearthly archbabble that warped all sense against its woof, sear-weaving all theologies and histories and stories into a syncretic whole, the progressionary arras of Gnosticishized timespacelovehate.

And then I heard Them.

Behind spacetime’s 4D tapestry-veil, there harmonized undreamable Beings in impeccable ecstasy. Their mere presences drilled the sensitive mold-slime of my mind with godsense, savors of salvation, heartstarting hints of resurrection. Forget knowledge: experience of sacredness now laser-carved my vermiculated brain into a rectilinear construction with ramparts, battlements, turrets and domes and banners and cannons, twin-oculused with stained glass, a castle-church inside my head, a church-castle erected with girders and rivets of language, unassailable, self-complete, pinning down life and death and pain, all questions and all answers, before I could ever even speak.

There was nothing left to know. There was only our end to seek. I was flamed. I was rained. I was snowed. I was made. I would fight life.

But then Norea surfaced from her trance and, still preaching her case, looked directly at me. As soon as we wove eyes I died, slivered by the many fine microwires of her perception. Her eyes cut me apart and reconstituted me—her eyes made me visible—her eyes gave me a body—her eyes read me for what I was: a soldier of the spear side: a son of Adam: a male. A potential element of evil. The enemy. In panic I giggled inanely, unstoppably, like a nuclear doll whose button was being mashed, on the margins of a meltdown. Then reality tore like wet paper, and she stretched distorted across my vision to all sides, hula-hoop rings of her eyes revolving around me like gimbals of buddha symbols, her caricature rolling flat around the rim of a cylinder closing in on my mind’s body, squeezing me ever tighter, shoving my breath into my nose, crushing my arms to my body, compressing me into a fissioning missilehead of ssself, my Ich taking ever less space, fragmenting to dots of thought narrowing down to one oceanically pressured point. And then it happened: my Second Fleshly Idiotification: My concussed nib-nub pulsed, swelled, POPPED.

Much more brain-sprained idiocy lay ahead. But first:

With a hushed whoosh my sore spirit launched from my still-giggling babyhead and rocketed through the drop ceiling. Freed from Norea, freed from Anke, I sailed above the concrete bunker into the clearing sky, arced up over industrial no-zones and dittoed subdivisions, and reached my parabola’s peak over the so-called freeways north of Todonto’s downtown, a most amazing citadel, a gobdropping glassy fortress of circummured commercial geometry glistening majestically, slotted with crystal glass, its magic minerals fused and mortared into rigid complexities, wired, piped, vented to their bones, respiring, godlike in defiance of nature, fingerhorns outfacing the dragon sun. Forget all my mother feared or father cussed: the city was pleasure-domed, Ferris-wheeled, radio-towered, humming from the buzz of millions of people, perfumed with the cooking scents of ten thousand restaurants and dumpsters, wriggling with songs, crepitant with chatter, rattling along its years, an odorous, rackety cacophony from the End Times. I was witnessing the tarry loveliness of life in Babel, the earthly paradise of our metal Babylon.

Yet my spirit was already falling over the city’s far side, dropping through seven circular rainbows, holing clouds, bursting birds, twinkling like a daystar down over sparser precincts toward the broad flat roof of a former hangar.

Like a sparkling talc aerolith my spirit fell past rafters, past fluorescent light-bars suspended over a beige grid of model kitchens and unalive living rooms, fell toward the sole animated square, a minor kingdom of hand-shaped furnifauna, where Marty, sovereign inventor with laborious creations posing around him, sat uprightly on an actual throne, clasping corneous armrests, chin lifted, staring into a zero. I fell down into his body and became him.

And Sweet Mother o’ Mary my spine fuckin hurt from sittin so long, geezus. My ass was ground beef, my bladder a hot-water bottle, my stomach prowling like a lion in a pit. But uh… so what? Bud, if I missed a sale cuz I tapped out to take a leak, well then I’d have nobody to cuss but my own dogdamned self. So would I let bodily frailty win? Fuck no! I would not budge! I would not back down! I would sit right here, at attention, shouldering the accumulating weight of the hours, without a single self-pitying gripe dribbling from my kisser!

Besides. Staying put had become a matter of personal honor, on account of the low-I.Q. business drones flogging acrylic crap on the next lot. During set-up they’d been so very palsy-walsy, the turdy bastards, but as the day wore out and their chihuahuaish wits got all antsy and nippy, they’d started leaning in to each other, glancing at me, muttering and chuckling. Not even being subtle about their mockery. But, so fuckin what, right? A cat may call a king mediocre. Only, by now there’d been ages of this childish behavior, and uh yeah, it was startin to get a little bit excessive. Those sneers… Those plastic faces… That jiggly giggling… They weren’t even trying to disguise their contempt and disdain. Shit, their total mental age was probably lower than Stef’s!

And I was not gonna show those painted rodeo clowns any infirmity of mine, no sir. I would not let them win. Never. They were nothin. They didn’t fuckin matter. None o’ these people mattered. Listen up, chump: I. did. not. need. anybody. I did not require an ally, or applause. I woulda stayed there even if I ain’t never peddled a footstool. Even if they ordered me to leave. Even if I was suffocating on the spot, in that colossal cow-patty of factory-produced bullshit. Even if they killed me! Come hell or high water, I would never make anything but exactly what I wanted and only what I wanted and nothing else. That’s what’s called being a man! That’s what it means to be free! And someday my shit would be discovered, and saluted, and appreciated, even by dumb mumblin numbskulls… and thusfore, it was obviously beneath my pride, worth and dignity to even fuckin acknowledge those yuk-yukking chuckleheads, I figgered. But then the schlocklord cocksuckers tittered again, and I saw I was gonna hafta say a thing, or two. Or five. All polite-like. All sweetie-piely.

But Lady Luck musta owed those sonsabitches a favor, cuz they got rescued by nothin less than a—dun dun dun dun—a disturbance in the Force! Man, it was odd. Like the room was receding, being sucked up into its own ass, vanishing in a straight line to where I was seated. I thought I was going nuts, then it hit me: clique after clique of the jolly jabberers was falling silent, like there was a great big obliterating tsunami of sound cancellation rolling toward me and knocking out everything in its path. I looked over just in time.

Almost on my tail were two of the weirdest-ass motherfuckers I ever seen.

The smaller fucker, totin a clipboard, had on slacks and tie and all that business crap, and except for his rockabilly pompadour woulda fit right in, had he not been a no-shit straight-up FREAK like from an old movie, a cyclops with one giant blue eye in the middle and a low wide nose kinda like a child’s fist. Yet he carried himself loosely, confidently, I mean noncha-fuckin-lantly. This fucker just cleaved through stares. And best of all—most hee-hee-heelarious of all—he had just shot the acrylic cunts with a 44. look of sheer unmitigated scorn, skeptically elevating the entire furry banana of his massive monobrow.

The taller fucker, however, attracted even more stares despite looking mostly normal. Really, this dude could have been any anonymously poncy middle-aged bicycling winedrinker, a black-turtlenecked professorial poodle with faggy hair and a phony three-day beardling—ya know the type: Mr. Moneyculture™—but also he was wearing this super fuckin intense expression, had these white-hot eyes like burning pearls in black felt bags, plus an equally nutso grin, a dirty, gleeful, mucho bastardo grin, the grin of a devil who’d just pissed on the grave of God. And then I recognized his grin from television.

That smug fuckoid was a big-name director.

But I stayed cool. I slid to my feet, began to put out my hand but crossed my arms instead. Or rather Marty did, for he’d gripped himself so tightly that he squeezed me out, and I started bleeding back into my brain-busted baby body, fading between locations and levels of consciousness, bunker and hangar inosculating into one migrainous whole: I moaned, Anke implored, Marty posed, Norea fetched tomes, the acrylic salesfairies swore, the rock-‘n’-roll cyclops clicked his biro, all while the most notorious living director strode beaming toward us, aglow with joy of power, with malicious love of artful rebellion, with grinning shameless walpurgisosity, still every inch the transgressive overman whose first movie’s premiere had provoked the audience first to throw their drinks and then to assault him. A man capable of shocking on lights, inciting slow riots, and starting societal fires, the surrealist auteur yelled:

WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

^[1]Anke suspected she was a character!—but her comprehension stopped atop that dime of discernment, for she could not grasp that I, the fabulizer, cannot be pleased or appeased, that no baroque sacrifice of will, love, or life could ever satisfy my rapacity for her suffering. She is mine, my mine and my mime to pilot around topoi, to sock-puppet in posey plaint, to dehisce the damson of her doom every time a reader torques her anew through her timorous maze of motions and emotions. So, keep in your little mind as you read that you connive in her torment and thus become my accomplice and assistant torturer. Does that trouble you? I imagine our world’s God’s abettors feel similarly, sickened by what they witness over his august sunset shoulder, as they observe the polymorphous and optically complicated unity that is each life lived under its umbrella of death, the organic time machine ticking as it slides along that inescapable spectrum from heaven to hell, from sun to sea, from desire to extinction, from meaningful to meaningless and sometimes back, and sometimes blacker, through time’s trajectories, pain’s parabolas, conceit’s cantilevers, and morality’s mausoleums, through rises and falls, waves and straights, dead ends and living ends… Don’t look long.

Well, that’s the end of the first book of Memoirs of a Mediocre Messiah. Later this year an edited form will be published by Ephesus Press. In a month I’ll post the spin-off, The Secret Gospel of Eve, which originally started off as the climax of this book but, like some strange and wonderful ergotic tumor, grew to 20,000 words, and necessarily had to be hived off into its own novella. Do not miss the lovely and mind-expanding adventures of Eve, who’s more unequivocally a hero than any of the grey-zone characters of this book. As for the sequel, it’s planned and half-written, but I’ll return to it only once some demand exists for it. For now I need to focus on projects that will bring me new readers. You understand, right?

The Trees Reach Out to Touch Me