Madam Keinar

During an afternoon dark phase the baby-sitter packs up her troubled employer and takes her downtown on a subway train.

One-sixty-nine Nussbaum is Keinar’s Candy and Tobacco Shop, owned and operated by Madam Keinar’s brother, Yonkl. When Laudette tells Yonkl, who reeks of vodka, they have come because of the ad in the Bleek Street Bugle, he seems delighted. He smiles and bids them follow him upstairs to an apartment where both Keinars, immigrants from Svobodia, have lived together since their arrival on the Freeway, some thirty years earlier. Yonkl tells them to wait in the parlor while he gets his sister out of bed. The room is overdecorated and not too clean. Three black cats stroll around a panoply of protective and divinatory fetishes, magic lamps, magic wands, crystal balls, prayer wheels and beads, magic carpets, divining caps and rods, bells, books, candles, and caducei.

There are human skulls and an assortment of animal bones. Laudette scans a collection of knives, choppers, and short swords and rolls her eyes. She says, “Oh Sugar, I don’t know about this …”, but Sarah is non-responsive and blank-eyed.

The medium emerges from the bedroom with a full mug of beer in her hand. When she greets them, she slurs her words and dribbles a little from the corner of her mouth. The sitter sits her blacked-out boss down in a wing chair but, uneasy about the devilish signs and symbols and the medium’s dissolute use of alcohol, stands next to Sarah, ready to march her out at the first sign of nonsense.

Ashen-haired, burned-out bombshell Sarah is not the only one who looks as if she’s seen a ghost. Looking every bit as spooky as the electrified leading lady in the movie Bride of Shreckenstern, Klare Keinar’s silver-streaked jet hair is wired in spiral shocks with pin curlers, her eyes are bloodshot, blackened and blued with eyeliner, and she is as ghastly white as pancake makeup will get her. The medium is not a medium, but a short and chubby, barely five feet. She has an owlishly flat face, a beak nose, huge Svobodian lips overstuck with red lipstick, and a constellation of hairy moles on her chin. In the final moments of her middle age, and with an extra-lumpy body, nevertheless she has the nerve to wear a paisley print dress, one of the new silkless silks, with a very low neckline that shows off her wrinkled, liver-spotted cleavage and clings to her soft, chunky belly, lumpy buttocks, fat hams and legs. The dress is not too clean, stained by beer and sweat. The shape Keinar is in is so sad, her style so hideously inappropriate, that she makes blockish Laudette feel a twinge of pride in being a natural she-woman: no pretense of glamor, fat, but sweet and clean.

At the same time Laudette notices a distinct crackle in the air around Keinar, like an electrical charge. When the two women shake hands Laudette feels a flash, as if a small bolt of lightning jumps from Keinar’s hand to hers.

Nervous, Laudette gets right to the point by waving her hand in front of Sarah’s unresponsive wide dark eyes. “This would be our problem. I work for this lady, Sug- Mrs H Thornton Swan Junior, Sarah by name. Most of the time lately she’s the vegetable you see here before you! Nobody home! Believe it or not six months ago this girl had a perfect figure eight. Now look at her, she’s down to skin and bones. And what about this sunburn?” Laudette turns the faraway peach to the side as if she were a rag doll, pulls her blouse up from her skirtwaist and reveals her blistered back. “It’s unnatural, I say. Ever since we moved here about three months ago, this lady has been getting worse. If you ask me there’s a spook in our new house that got on her mind and won’t let her live in peace. I’m pretty sure it’s ghosts. It gives me goose bumps to even think about it, but three people died in the very bed she sleeps in. A wife shot her husband in the head, and she and her boyfriend slept happily ever after in it until they died too, twenty years later, from a gas leak.” Laudette hesitates to say more. She knows that Sarah’s denial of Corn Dog and his subsequent death has direct bearing on the mental case in question. She must choose between keeping the secret she swore to always keep and trusting in the confidentiality of the healer-patient relationship. As she does when discussing the situation with Harry, Laudette decides to steer a middle course with the medium, familiarize her with the overall situation rather than the specifics. “Some time ago in another city this girl suffered quite a shock. Someone very close to her died and she had some good reason for holding herself to blame. She took to praying to some devil dogs. I heard her loud and clear, asking them all—one by one—to undo this friend’s death. I think she was putting some body language in her prayers too, if you take my meaning. I told her it was bad luck to try to bring back what the Lord had taken away, but she wouldn’t listen. So I guess she might have dredged up some unhappy soul or even a demon from hell, huh?”

All this time Keinar has been looking straight into Sarah’s dull eyes. Her only movement is to periodically bring the mug of beer to her lips, take a mouthful, and swallow. “Please!” She says when the glass is empty, spitting out the word in a testy nasal voice, “Enough. Allow me, I’m psychic.”

“Oops! That’s right, so you are, I almost forgot!” Laudette settles into a couch while the medium passes her hands over Sarah’s frazzled silver pate, looking into it with her penetrating owl eyes as if it were a crystal ball. Then she pulls up a rocking chair and sits down directly in front of Sarah, a few feet away, so she can slide to the edge of the rocker and have her knees almost touching Sarah’s. She bends forward, her elbows on her knees, her fists to her temples, extends her thumbs and index fingers, and flicks them up and down, in and out. She clucks her tongue, as if she were changing gears, switching channels. “Yes,” says the medium, closing her eyes to better see the wavelengths Sarah has in mind, “I detect many supernatural forces and unauthorized psychic phenomena surrounding this sister. I see a man writing her name in a big black book. He’s her father, I believe. He thinks that writing her name is a blessing for her, but the sorry truth is it’s a blotch on her soul, a curse she must split herself to overcome. Next I see a beautiful boy, the child’s father, a bronze-skinned mixed-breed in a golden fleece, an underdog, an artist, a little brazen and rough around the edges, coming into her life …”

“Damn!” Miss Lord does not swear lightly, but she is amazed when Keinar describes the resourceful brave Corn Dog to a tee, right on his jazz age melancholy, right on his abstract art blankets, and right on his obscure, unpatterned life style.

“The day she told her father the truth, that she was in love with this boy and pregnant with his child, was the day both her father and lover withdrew from her, one in hatred, one in fear for his life. Am I right? I can see more. Before she was married she was the type of artist’s model who put men in the picture for money. Right? It was to get revenge on her father that she sold herself. While she was at it she took revenge on herself. Did she not? For not wanting to miss a trick, she denied knowing the love of her life, and caused his death. Am I right? There was some violence. I see policemen. But this boy is gone, and glad to be: melted ghost and all into the night of Eternal Light. I can definitely say it’s not his ghost that’s bothering her.”

“God bless me, yes!” But good luck telling that to Sugar, Laudette thinks.

“But what’s this now? Death separates and it also ties together. I see another presence is being pulled into her by the vacuum in her heart. Wait! I can almost see his aura—”

Here Keinar stops and gasps as if what she is seeing were too marvelous for words. Laudette gets to the edge of her seat waiting for what the medium will say next.

“Uh-oh,” says Keinar, letting her voice drop, “the picture is getting unclear, the image is fading, but I think I can help her. It would help me if I could hold something that belongs to this troubled sister close to my heart.” She opens her eyes, unhooks her right hand from her head, holds it out, snaps her fingers and rubs them together. Laudette gets the message. She fishes around in Sarah’s purse and comes up with a twenty-dollar bill. The medium makes it disappear into the breach between her flabby breasts before she puts her antenna back on.

“Aah, that’s much better. The picture is coming in now. I can see the colors clearly. Wait—what? It cannot be! But, yes, yes, yes …” Keinar says, addressing a presence Laudette can’t see, “… oh, my dear sweet Lord … tee hee hee …” The medium lies back in her rocker, wiggling and giggling as if something were tickling her. She drops her hands from her head to between her legs, squeezes her thighs together, and pumps her pelvis. Her lumpy body shivers and her head flaps from side to side. She sounds off through her nose with a rip-snorting blare, a noise between a trumpet blast and a wild goose honk. Then she goes limp, twitching, purring with sexual satisfaction. It shocks and embarrasses Laudette that the medium would do such a thing at all, much less with strangers present. The proper sitter is just about to protest when suddenly Keinar sits upright, opens her eyes, and addresses Laudette excitedly, lucidly, soberly.

“I see Sister Sarah is being haunted, but not by a ghost. We might assume because there were three deaths in the room she sleeps in she is being bothered by ghosts, but to assume makes an ass of you and me. I do see a sailor killed by his wife upon his homecoming. For a long time his ghost wandered, suffering. But, because of just causation, he was released when Sister Sarah’s conjuring drew this Master to her. What’s bugging her is a projection of the Horny God.”

“Her imagination, you mean.”

“No, it’s not her imagination. That’s the remarkable part. This type of possession often comes when a person has mixed up internal and external emotions. Of course, in reality everything is mixed up with everything else. We make distinctions to keep from succumbing to the type of confusion that now plagues our Sister. But the uncommon thing about Sister Sarah’s visitation is that—” the medium begins to talk slowly as if she were spelling it out for Laudette—“this—is—an—actual—flesh—and—blood—living—being. Oh yes, Sister Laudette, this Being has the power to ride on radio wavelengths and bring a hard, hot male body with him.”

Laudette is dismayed to see the medium crack a blanked-out grin just like Sarah’s when she’s just had a lapload of monkey business.

“Really now? Are you saying he’s a superman who can get lustful parts of himself half-way around this world without a plane?” asks Laudette, her eyes wide in disbelief.

“Well, from what I understand so far, Sister Sarah’s Visitor has a body, an extensive dream body, that can make it to the fruited plane and back. As a living God, an Incarnation of the Terminator of Death, Lord and Master of all realms of existence, blissful and hellish, he can project multiple visions of himself to extraordinary lengths. He has put a double of himself out on the air to Sister Sarah.”

A confirmed monotheist, Laudette shakes uneasily. “Let me get this straight. You’re saying some monkey fell out of the trees of the fruity plane and landed smack in Sugar’s terra firma lap?”

“The character on the air travels in the fourth dimension, Sister,” says Keinar. “We call this extra range ‘the fruited plane’. Before we have had the experience of it, the fruited plane is very difficult for we beings locked in three dimensions to imagine, yet it is more solid than our seeming solid existence. It is the extent that is perpendicular to length, width and depth. It is an up that goes down, an across that stays back, an inside that comes out. The final stage is always the beginning, the outcome is the start. On the seed level maturity grows young again. It is the sphere of potentials and of causes and consequences of our earthly life.”

“You mean like heaven and hell?” asks Laudette.

“Relatively, yes; absolutely, no. There are numberless levels between heaven and hell.”

“Then maybe it’s what the Dipster called purgatory, where you got to go through all those stages to be clean of your sins. Is that what this monkey is, some demon sent to trim Sugar here for the wrong she did?”

“No, Sister Laudette, I don’t think so. And you can call him a Monkey if you like, but just remember this is a God, not a beast. Not a Holy God as you’re used to, or an all-knowing father figure, distant and threatening, but the type of divine character who likes to let his hair down, become a lower case pronoun, and take you in on the action. What’s coming to our Sister in such a raw meaty way is a Universal Self, a Consciousness who identifies with the self before it said ‘I.’ Perhaps, we might call such a being with an appetite for both carnal and symbolic knowledge a ‘Meataphor’.” The medium smiles subtly but Laudette shows no sign of getting the joke.

“If you ask me, thinking about this monkey is nothing but trouble, ma’am. Look at what it did to Mrs Swan here.”

But Keinar puts her hands back to her temples, and rolls her eyes up in her head, as if she were leaving this plane once again. “I can see where he comes from,” she says. “He lives on a remote mountain in the land of Poong …”

Then she falls into a fervent silence, not unlike Sarah’s. Her white eyeballs seem to glow with an eerie light. The chill gleam of death in life makes Laudette squirm, giving her gooseflesh.

Laudette has heard of Poong. When she was a young girl growing up in Kingsborough, her minister, the Reverend Dipster Jambalaya Jackson, said that if you were to dig down deep enough under the swampy earth around Louisport, the Dipster’s home town, you would come out on the other side of the earth, high, remote and rocky, in Sham’balaya, the Poongi holy city in the Pu Mountains.

Laudette mulls over her geography, wondering, if that’s where you get from Louisport, where you would get digging under Sharpwood Avenue, or the museum, or the Bay Area? Keinar floats quietly in a light trance. Neither notices at first that Sarah has become conscious. The ghastly little woman facing her with white eyeballs and her hands held like six guns on each side of her head provides the burned-out bombshell with a real eye-opener. She scans the store of psychic charms. Puzzled, nervous, she turns around looking for an explanation and sees a glint of gold-toothed Laudette also trying to avoid the medium’s eyes. Ah, at least she knows who’s behind this.

“Miss Lord, what’s going on here? Where am I and how did I get here? And who is this strange woman?”

“Uh? Are you back, Sugaree? You see! I’ve been telling you, you got the blankouts. You don’t remember riding here on the subway, do you? Do you believe me now?”

Sarah remembers her afternoon nap, the restless dreams, the purple haze, being taken hold of by something strong and creamy, and the sex bolts from the blue that boiled her blood and laid her out. Other than that she is a blank. “Did I really get up, get dressed, and come here in the underground with you?”

Laudette wouldn’t tell a lie, but she does hide her doubts about the medium from Sarah. She knows that the patient has to believe in the healer. “Now, Sugar, this here is Madam Klare Keinar, and she’s amazing. She’s in some kind of trance state now, but she can be clear as day, believe me. She’s going to help us find out why you have these spells.” The big woman drops her voice to a soft, sympathetic whisper, “She already said it’s not Mister Corn Dog or any other dead dog that’s so sweet on you. You got a live one on your tail now, Sugar, coming from halfway around the world in Ping Pong Land! Just like the Dipster used to say, ‘The dead ones can’t hurt you the way the live ones can.’ Now just sit back and listen to what this smart lady has to tell you!”

In the alternating currents of the moon there is light and dark. When Sarah comes into the light and talks to Laudette the dark side of the page that the clairvoyant is reading becomes obscure. The medium clicks her tongue switches off, comes out of her reverie, unrolls her eyes, and greets Sarah on the surface with self-assured cordiality.

“Welcome, Sister Sarah, to this waking plane. No doubt Sister Laudette has given you the news. I’ve just been tracking the Source of the signal that’s been coming to you. It’s a male body, isn’t it? Literally, not a figure of speech or a delusion of your mind.”

Sarah whimpers noncommittally.

“The love you lost, the mixed-breed, is gone to eternal life. But I suspect you know that. Accept it. To be with him you must go on living yourself, and learn to handle this new love in your life.”

Spook-ridden Sarah refuses to hear what she thinks she hears. “Mixed-breed? What are you talking about? Miss Lord! I’ve just been a bit nervous and distracted lately, and that’s all. I never gave you permission to drag me off to see a witch doctor.” She tries to go, but Laudette grabs her shoulders from behind and won’t let her. “We already paid twenty dollars consolation fee to this lady and heck if we’re not going to get an explanation of this business as she sees it.”

“Thank you, Sister Laudette,” says the medium. “Try to relax, Sister Sarah. We are all haunted, some more than others. We must use this visitation to remind ourselves that we are Horny Goddesses, each with the power to get over her own hump, whatever that may be. For each of us the Presence is something different.

“In the Eternal City they call bewitchment from without ‘obsession,’ from within ‘possession.’ A devil is a ‘fallen angel,’ a demon is ‘a soul in hell.’ A female spirit that descends on a man and has sex with him is called a ‘succubus,’ a male spirit that comes on a woman is known as an ‘incubus.’ Incubi do not come along every day, but a living man who has conquered death and can send a charismatic body to such holy ghostly wavelengths is so rare that even the Patriano Church has no word for him. We who connect with the Mother Goddess hold that the men of our dreams are inside of us, as the fruit of our wombs. It’s very rare for one of these soul-mates to exist in objective reality.

“Yes, you’ve got a Divine Body on you, Sister Sarah. And he comes to you not only because he doesn’t have a voice, but because he doesn’t have a choice. He is addicted to you, as you are addicted to him. He has spent a good deal of his time lost, alone, confused and sick at heart.”

Laudette snorts and worms in her seat. She is sure that a lost god is a false one. “And why do you think this whatchamacallit is so interested in Sugar?” she asks.

“That I’m not totally sure about that yet, Sisters,” Keinar continues. “But my feelings tell me that he was desperately looking for companionship. Sister Sarah has saved him. But whatever, this is a matter of great moment, a rare experience to be contacted thus, Sister Sarah, and an honor for me to be on this case. Oh yes, it’s very exciting!”

The split pea fidgets but Laudette keeps her pinned to the chair while Keinar briefs them on metaphysics.

“Each and every one of us produces an electromagnetic charge that creates a force field around us made up of our inner thoughts and emotions. This field is positive or negative, depending on our individual net psychic self-worth. Opposites attract. Contrast exists so we can know ourselves. Like male and female, night and day, and all other polar opposites, positive and negative are each aspects of the other. For the average person, health is the happy medium, the golden mean, somewhere between half empty and half full. But there are a few who try to find the middle by burning the candle at both ends, one way on the outside, and quite another within. Haven’t both extremes been your norm, Sister Sarah? I can see! Very good and very bad. All in all you’re a very negative person. You’re a person without a center, a nothing, a black hole, a cipher. In fact if you were evil you’d have been a lot better off, but your fault was not rooted in malice, rather in stupidity, a worse, more primal and dangerous sin.”

“Did you hear the things she called me, Miss Lord? And we’re paying for this? You’re fired!”

“Sir Harry will say otherwise, now shush and listen.”

“There, there, Sister Sarah, everything passes, but the first cuts in the personality are the deepest, and the last to heal. We’re saved by our own faults, Sisters, damned only by our own damning. A woman without a center is prime to be a center herself. By being so empty inside you’ve left your field open to the reception of the most powerful of positive signals. I get the picture of a red hot pole, just the kind of counterpoint your dead black hole was after. You bask in your visitor’s rash violet glow. Does that sound like what comes over you? Am I getting warm?”

Sarah won’t answer.

“Sister Laudette showed me the burns on your back. She didn’t have to! I can see from reading your electromagnetic record the grilling you’ve subjected yourself to. You have no idea how dangerous what you’re doing is. Look at you! A charred wreck and still going back for more. Turning yourself inside out for the male principle will never do, even if he is divine. That is the hole in your womanhood thinking for you: you imagine a male’s love, approval, and constant attention holds the key to your treasures, and you will disappear if you show yourself in any way other than model. In the Craft we highlight our shortcomings rather than try to hide them. Now, the remarkable thing here is that, regardless of his power, this visitor of yours is as flesh and blood as you or I. He has a body in this world, and he’s putting his life and member at risk to be with you. Fortunately Sister Laudette here has brought you to me before it was too late. No serious damage has been done, and great good may come of it. But we must put things right quickly. This Presence must be given the opportunity to come through a neutral professional medium.”

The idea of her secret admirer going into this toad of a woman seems laughable to Sarah. What charm does Keinar have? The goddess has not looked into a mirror lately to see how gaunt she’s gotten. Laudette can see; Keinar is right. Sarah, who cared more to make a showy appearance than to tell the inner truth, has had to let her looks slide to demonstrate her honesty. Split to the core, the pea doesn’t even realize she’s doing it.

“Of course, you are not very keen on giving up the meaty stuffing,” says Keinar. “Usually clients with spooky houses come to me and beg me to clear them, but since you’ve picked up this haunt on yourself and have become devoted to its overly friendly ways with your person, it’s natural you will be threatened by any attempt to drive him out. But rest assured, we are not going to drive him out, but get you two synched, working with one another.”

What is this sinked stuff? Laudette is rather disappointed that Keinar does not recommend a good old-fashioned exorcism. “Send the devil packing, that’s what I say.”

“No, that will never do.” Keinar explains, “The depths of our souls are not all sweetness and light. The darkness is an essential part of our being. It cannot be annihilated. When it is not acknowledged it becomes unknown, when it is unknown it becomes evil. So long as it is denied, it will come between us and the things we see, and our vision will be distorted, and much that is good in the world will seem dark and monstrous. Clear vision is what’s necessary, my Sisters, to free ourselves. And we won’t have that until we can face ourselves in our darkest parts. Cooperation, union, that’s the key to the power, and adulteration will tone this God down to a figure of speech and raise the woman consciousness in us, to give our flesh the dignity and divinity it deserves. Oh, Sister Sarah, don’t fear. The most frightening thing we all have to face is ourselves. I’m going to help you get on top of this thing, or die trying.”

Laudette does not like all this talk about the dark. But for lack of a better plan of her own she remains silent and listens.

“I will need your cooperation, Sister Sarah. You must invite me to your home tomorrow so I can raise this Horny God, and let him broadcast through me. You’ll be able to face him and communicate.”

Sarah says, “Go fuck yourself with the broom you came in on, you old witch.”

“Watch your mouth, Sugar,” Laudette says, surprised at Sarah’s profanity. “Of course, Madam Keinar, we’ll be waiting for you tomorrow.”

“At three. The cost for a house call is forty.”

Laudette doesn’t think that the fee for clearing the air will be a problem. “We’ll be there. Come now, Sugar, let’s go.”

Sarah succumbs once more to a bleary fatigue. She shivers, shakes, and grumbles while the baby-sitter wraps her in her coat, hustles her out onto Nussbaum Street and back down into the subway.