TIME TRAVEL FOR PEDESTRIANS
Masturbation fantasy is the last frontier.
When we travel to other planets we won’t find much that we can’t see or guess at from here, but there are things so strange we can hardly get the fingers of our minds around them that are closer to us than our own skin. Martin Esslin said it, in The Theatre of the Absurd:
“In a world that has become absurd, transcribing reality with meticulous care is enough to create the impression of extravagant irrationality.”
Have you ever seen those photographs in magazines of familiar objects taken from an unfamiliar angle or from very close up? It’s hard to recognize even such an everyday thing as the end of a cigarette when you see it up close. Why is this true? Because you never do look at things, not really. The closer a thing is to you, the less you examine it, the more you take it for granted and ignore it. On TV you learn all about the private lives of the famous, but what about your own private life? What do you know about that?
What do you really know, for instance, about the stag films projected on those dark night flights into your own private lost continents, projected against the inner surfaces of your closed eyelids when you sit in the Cock Pit and grasp the Joy Stick in a sweating hand? There’s no movie reviewer to tell you whether the film is good for you or not. Perhaps the plot, if written down, would seem rather idiotic, yet this sort of film, that you project for yourself and yourself alone, seems to hold you spellbound. You return to it again and again, never growing weary of repeating the same arbitrary details over and over.
What do you think about when you jack off, or when you “make love”? Is it torture? And if it is, are you the tortured or the torturer? Is it leather clothes? Or rubber clothes? Is it high heels? Or do you dream of dressing in the clothes of the opposite sex, or even of trading bodies with the “loved one”? Is your mother there watching you in your mind, or your father, or someone who once rejected you? Is God watching you, condemning you? Is it silk? Nylon? Huge heaving breasts or wiggling rumps? Or is it the mouth of the womb itself, giving you a bearded kiss or spreading wide open to allow your return to the soft, warm darkness from which you came? Is it little girls or little boys, great round eyes fixed upon your hand as you slowly unzip your fly?
Are you thinking about it now? Is the picture once again flickering before your eyes? If it is, then this time look at it, long and hard. Examine it as if it were a masterpiece of art. Meditate on it as if it were the words of a great teacher. For it is the one thing in the universe that you have made for yourself alone, and not to impress someone else or to gain the approval of the church, the government, or the “respectable community.” It may well be the only doorway that will ever open to allow you entrance into your own inner self.
Why do you hang back? Haven’t you always thought Socrates was so frightfully wise when he took as his motto, “Know thyself”? Come. Let us enter. “It isn’t as easy as all that,” you may say. And you’re right. There’s something blocking your way. Let’s put it a little more poetically. There’s an angel guarding the entrance, with a flaming sword. He’s been there a long time, but he is never tired. Angels don’t need to sleep. You’ll have to trick him, or drug him, if you want to get past.
I chose to drug him.
I went to the Five-and-Ten at the local shopping center and bought some very ordinary flower seeds. The pusher was a middle-aged Catholic saleslady in the garden department.
I think her name was Eve.
Then I went home and took a hammer and pounded the seeds to powder. I kept them in their packages while I pounded, so that they wouldn’t fly all over the place. I had to sift them many times through a tea sieve before they formed a fine enough powder to suit me. Then I spread the powder over the surface of a dish of strawberry ice cream.
The angel in my mind touched me with fear, standing between me and the ice cream, but I knew from the Bible that if you fight an angel and win, the prize can be very great sometimes, so I ate it anyway. The ground seeds tasted like sawdust.
Then I went upstairs to my bedroom, where I had a double bunk all prepared for the occasion. Beside the bunk was a tape recorder on which I had recorded my own voice reading, over and over again, the First Bardo from the Tibetan Book of the Dead as translated by Timothy Leary. That’s the chapter all about Ego Death. The Book of the Dead was the “In Thing” at that time, if you recall.
I lay down on the lower bunk.
From there I could see, scotch-taped to the lower face of the upper bunk, a Hindu hypnograph I had put up there some months ago when I had used it to soothe a toothache through hypnosis. As you can see, everything was “programmed.” Did I tell you that I once was an IBM computer programmer?
I turned on the tape recorder and relaxed, listening to my own boring voice droning on and on, waiting for something to happen. (I had “tripped” before, but never with such elaborate preparations.) After a while something did happen. I got sick to my stomach.
I ran down to the bathroom and knelt before the john and threw up once, twice, three times. But it wasn’t unpleasant, as it usually is. It was good. It was more than good. It was ecstatic. I was throwing up with my whole body, holding nothing back. It was an orgasm, or at least what an orgasm can be when it’s good, when nobody is likely to bust in on you or when nobody is saying “Shhh, someone might hear you.”
So I knew I was high.
And the light was different, too. You know, sort of bluewhite, as if everything were under water on a bright day. And the flickers of flame were silently dancing on every polished surface.
I lay down again.
The tape recorder was still talking.
God, I sounded pompous and stupid on the tape!
But still I decided to co-operate with that idiotic other self of mine who had set up this elaborate farce. Like, why not?
I looked at the hypnograph above me, at the dot in the middle you’re supposed to concentrate on, and the voice on the tape machine said “Ego Death.” I couldn’t seem to catch the rest of it. “Ego Death. Ego Death. Ego Death.”
Then it was only, “Death. Death. Death. Death.”
“For Chrissakes,” I thought, in momentary terror. “This is a trap!”
The angel was laughing now, but he was dark, and huge, and monstrous, and I knew that angels and devils are really the same. They are angels if you are on their side and devils if you’re against them.
I sprang up, soaked in sweat, and tore off my clothes until I stood naked in the center of the room, panting and licking my salt lips. The titles of the books in my bookcase seemed to be speaking to me, and it was all about death that they were speaking.
I took hold of my dick. It was stiff and hard.
I felt safe, holding it.
I lay down on the lower bunk again, slowly, gently milking Old Dick with a practiced hand.
I looked at the hypnograph. Portions of it were starting to black out from time to time, winking out of reality and back again. The voice on the tape must be obeyed! The voice on the tape was the voice of my angel, perhaps even the voice of God.
“Death,” said the pompous voice of absolute authority. “Death. Death. Death.”
Then I remembered my favorite masturbation fantasy, the one where I am a girl with beautiful long black hair being fucked by a man with a beard. In an instant the fantasy took hold and I could no longer see the hypnograph, no longer hear the voice that said “Death.” I returned to the reality of the bunk in my room just long enough to grab a black candle I had intended to burn later, after dark. I looked at it wildly for an instant, then thrust it brutally up my ass as the room I was in and some other room, where I was that girl with the long black hair, flickered rapidly in and out of my consciousness. The angel was trying to hold me back (Was there something protective about the clawed hand he laid on my arm?) but I shook him off and fell out of twentieth century America into . . . where? And when?
But who cared when the bearded man was so wonderfully rough, thrusting so deep up inside me, kissing my shoulders, my arms, my breasts? To be pierced! To be run through, to be stabbed deep again and again by that hard knife of blood-bloated flesh! Oh my God! How good it was!
My head was suddenly full of German. I was German. I was in Germany.
And there were other men and women in the room. I could hear them shout and laugh and struggle. I could smell the stink of bodies long unwashed and sweating. The air was hot and wet and close and full of smoke from torches stuck into the walls that threw dancing shadows on the mass of naked and half-clothed bodies that writhed about me.
Now another man was mounting me, and then another.
Oh, my God, it was good!
And at last the Great One came.
The Great One was a man wearing the skin of an animal.
Or was it the spirit of an animal wearing the body of a man?
“My Lord,” I whispered to him.
With a savage snarl, half-rage, half-tenderness, he threw me to the hard earthen floor of the hut and entered me, and it was painful but it was good. The drug in my blood make it good. The Great One was so huge in his dick he almost split me in half, but still it was good.
Then it was morning and I wandered away from the hut, still naked, dancing aimlessly, without rhythm, through the tall, dew-wet weeds. The sun was just coming up. The birds were singing in the autumn trees. Nobody was with me. I came to the coven alone. Alone I left. Marriage is for Christians, not for those who remember the Old Religion, not for a girl who is the wife of the God or the wife of all men or no men. I sang a song against marriage as I walked up the hill.
From the hilltop I looked down on the village and the church in the center of it. Perhaps I was cold. I know not. The drug kept me warm. I could have stood naked in the snow with the drug in me and not felt the cold.
How small the church looked, down there, how small and weak. In their book the Christians claim they once healed the blind and lame with a touch, but if that’s true, why can they do it no longer? I can do it. We can do it. I laughed at them, prisoners in their safe little town, for they could not even walk the woods at night, as I could, for all that lives is my friend and their enemy.
Great power is given to the free! The power to cure . . . or kill, with a glance of the eye.
I felt weak. Dizzy.
And this was not right. The dancing with the Great One was more restful than sleep. They know the Great One’s wives, down in the town, by the lightness of their step and the song on their red lips. The Christians know us and are afraid. Their skins are pale and they are always sick, knowing not how to eat and drink to live long and fuck merry.
But now I was sick. I was sick! How could that be?
I felt then, for the first time, the wetness on my leg. I looked down and saw the blood running from my cunt down my legs. My blood, and my power, and my life, were running out, and so quickly!
“Oh, must I die so soon?” I said softly.
For when we die we know it. The body tells so many things to those who listen to it. But my angel said, “Your sacrifice was not good.”
“Not good?” I cried. “I burned my own newborn babe to the God tonight!”
“Not as one who gives a priceless gift,” said the dark angel, “but as one who rids herself of an unwanted burden. As one who gives garbage to the God!”
“No! No! It’s not true!” I called out.
The angel saw my lie and only smiled. “The Christians made you ashamed,” he said. “Ashamed of being a mother with no husband.”
“No!” I shouted again, but it is useless to shout against angels.
“I tell you this,” said the angel. “If you falter in your faith, if you listen to the Christians and become ashamed, I shall turn my face away from you and the world will be given to them instead. There is a trial in the other world between the Gods, and you are the jury. I give you knowledge and freedom, while my Brother gives only commands. If your body dies, it is nothing. You’ll soon be back in another body. But if your faith dies, the case will be won by the Tyrant, and you and I shall both die the second death from which there is no return.”
“No,” I cried a third time, for now the fear of death was coming on me. “Help me! Don’t let me die!”
“You are losing me,” said the angel softly. “Remember. Remember when you were on earth before.”
“I remember nothing! Oh, save me, angel!”
But the angel was gone.
I wandered down the hill toward the road.
I climbed over a fence of loose-piled stones.
I cried and sobbed and tried to stop the blood with my hand, but it flowed steady and only made my helpless fingers red and sticky. The flies were after me now. I hate flies.
I reached the road, but I was too weak to go on, so I half-fell, half-knelt in the sand. Now I no longer cried. Crying uses precious energy, and I had so little of that left.
Also, I was no longer afraid or unhappy.
While I lived many an animal gave his life to feed me, and many a plant. Even plants have spirits, and animals certainly do, no matter what the foolish Christians say. They died for me. Now I die for them. That is the world’s agreement with us. There were some ants in the dust of the road. They began crawling on me. They began to gather around the spreading stain of my blood, like my brothers and sisters in the coven gathering to the great feast of Midsummer’s Eve.
“Merry meet, merry part, my darlings,” I said to the ants, as I lay down gently in the sand, trying not to crush any of them. The sun came up and warmed my naked flesh, which was good, since as the drug wore off I began to feel the cold in the morning breeze. I lay so still a bee landed close to my nose and I could see the beautiful shifting colors in his wings.
The flies were there too, and they also had pretty wings.
I don’t really hate flies.
And then I died.
And dying, I remembered.
I was a boy and I tended goats.
My meat was goat meat. My drink was goat milk. My clothing was goat skins. I tended goats and protected them from wild animals and demons. My God had the face of a goat, and the blood of goats was poured out to Him on the stone before our hut.
When the man with the clothes that were not made of skins came to us and told us of Jesus and showed us the dead man on the cross we were kind to him, as we are kind to all strangers, as it is certainly true that all of us are strangers passing through this world again and again. But we could not believe in the things he said and besides he spoke with such an accent some young men could not help but laugh at him. He then grew angry and went away, this Jesus man.
Before he left, he said, “Those who cannot learn from the word must then learn from the sword.” We knew what he meant and were troubled. We have never learned the arts of war in this rough land, depending on the unpleasantness of our climate and the infertility of our soil to discourage invaders. The Jesus man did not want our land, as an ordinary enemy might. He wanted us. He wanted us to become his goats, that he could protect or kill, as he wished.
But months passed with no word of him, and we forgot him in our daily round with the goats and our private feuds between families. (These fights between families rarely produced fatalities, since they were fought almost exclusively with quarterstaffs.)
Then, one afternoon when the sun was warm and the sky without a cloud, I was watering the goats at a stream near the Dun bridge when I heard a horse coming at a slow walk in the distance. I ran up and stood on the bridge, trying to catch a glimpse of the rider, for the truth is that horses are rare things in this country.
In a moment I saw him, coming up the rocky pitted road.
The cross on his shield was plain enough even at a distance, so I knew he was the man with the sword the Jesus man had promised to send after us. I knew also that I was not going to let this man pass over our bridge, save after I was dead. It’s little enough our people have, but we do have our pride, and that no man can take from us.
All the same I was scared.
This horseman rode so slow and steady. He must have seen me, standing in the middle of the bridge with my quarterstaff, but he rode neither slower nor faster than he had before sighting me. Perhaps the horse had but one gait, and that a slow one, for he was surely the biggest, heaviest beast that ever bore the name of horse. I suppose he had to be a big one to carry the weight of all the armor the rider wore. When this great monster of a horse and his rider all bound up in metal were within earshot I called out, “Hey, what’s your business here?”
“I’ve come to teach good Christian ways to you and your demon-loving people,” he answered, and oh, his voice was cold.
“It’s we who may be teaching you manners,” I shouted. “We are many and there’s but one of you.”
“One of us is enough,” he said, “with God and cold metal on my side.” He raised his lance and kept on coming, neither slower nor faster than before.
“Stop!” I shouted, raising my stick. I had been taught that a well-used quarterstaff could deflect a lance, if you were quick enough with it. “Stop, I say!”
He bent forward slightly in the saddle and gave his horse a little kick with his heels. The ungainly creature broke into a heavy trot. In an instant those great hoofs sounded on the bridge and that sharp bright point of the lance was bearing down on me. I held my staff in both hands, waiting for the exact instant to jerk it up and send the lancepoint harmlessly to one side. Then, a quick thrust between the horse’s legs and . . .
Now!
I brought up my staff smartly, exactly right, but the man in metal was too strong for me. His lance went into my belly, deep in, and came out again through my back. It was painful, being pierced, but not so bad as I had expected. I didn’t faint. I didn’t even cry out. I was just . . . surprised.
The horseman reined in and backed off, pulling his lance carefully free of me. That’s what really hurt! And seeing that point swing up and back, covered with my blood and bits and strings of my guts. It was the thought of it that hurt me, really. The idea of being pierced, stabbed, run through. The idea was what hurt most.
I stepped back, and my foot came down on empty air.
I made a futile try at keeping my balance, but it was too late. Down I went with a rush and a wet thump, into the shallows of the stream under the bridge. I looked up. The horseman was laughing so hard he almost fell off his horse, looking down at me through the slits in his helmet. He was still laughing when he turned his horse and continued on across the bridge.
I tried to move my legs, but they no longer obeyed me. I thought then that perhaps I had broken my back in the fall.
My people could place no blame on me. I had done all I could to stop the invader. Then I thought, “No, I could have run ahead and given warning. Now he will take my people by surprise.” Only then did I begin to cry. My bravery had been all for nothing, where my cowardice might have made possible some defense, however feeble.
The water went on flowing over my half-submerged body. I watched, through my tears, the sunlight dancing on the surface like leaping fire, and I said to myself, very softly, “If I return to Earth again, I shall return as one of the strong, like that horseman.”
And that thought made me smile as I died.
When I did return to the world it was in Southern France, near the Spanish border. I had, of course, forgotten all about my past life. Or had I? There was something about the passing of mounted men of arms that made me excited beyond belief, and when I saw the sign of the cross a strange emotion, awe mixed with fear and, perhaps, a touch of hate, swept over me.
Once, in a parade, I saw some high church dignitaries riding, all covered with jewels and fine clothing, and I thought, “Some day, I shall be like that.”
My parents owned a house and lands, but overseers and servants saw to the running of them. My father worked and studied in one little room in the great house, writing far into the night by candlelight and reading ancient scrolls in Greek and Latin. He was a hard man to talk to, but one day I went to him (I was then in my early teens) and told him I wished to become a priest.
He did not answer me at first, as he sat there in his carved chair, one arm on an octagonal wood-inlaid table and the other hanging loose so his fingertips touched the rug, while I stood tongue-tied before him. At last he slowly shook his head, as if an infinite weariness had come over him.
“Do you think I’ve cared for you all these years only to hand you over to the Pope?” he demanded, his long, delicate scholar’s fingers doubling into fists.
“What’s wrong with that?” said I.
“Let me show you,” he said, gentle now, no longer angry.
He showed me things he had translated out of the ancient scrolls in Latin and Greek, showed me quotations from the Bible, quotations from Josephus, one dusty scroll after another until my vision blurred and my head was spinning. “You see?” he kept saying eagerly. “You see?”
At last I could contain myself no longer. I cried out, “No, I don’t see! I don’t understand!”
“But it’s so clear,” said my father, fixing me with his great dark hollow eyes. “The Pope is the anti-Christ. The Catholic Church is not Christ’s mission in the world, but the Devil’s.”
For a moment I was too stunned to speak, then I shouted, “No! No! I won’t listen!” and ran from the room. I knew then, for the first time, that my father was a heretic.
He never spoke to me again on the subject of religion, and rarely on any other subject. It was my sister, two years younger than I, who became from that day forward his constant companion, who now wore boy’s clothing and began to be raised as a boy, and I understood that she had taken my place with my father, that he had meant for me to inherit his house and lands and carry on his demon-inspired work with the old books and scrolls, but that now everything, everything would go to her.
When he lay on his deathbed, it was she, not I, that he called to his side, while I stood outside the closed door, straining to hear their whispering. And when he died, it was she who put on his emerald ring and great green cloak and went every day into the little room to work until after midnight behind locked doors. She and I had been so close, when we had been younger, and had played at being knight and lady in the open fields, even at being lovers. (A sister’s kiss is the sweetest of any, because it’s forbidden.) Now that was all done and finished. The locked door and the piles of ancient manuscripts lay between us like a curse.
I went to the village priest and told him everything, including the demon work of my father and sister, and my own desire to become a priest. It was in my mind that I was really helping her, as if calling in a doctor for someone who is ill, and it was also in my mind that I wanted an education, so that I could read Latin and Greek as my sister could, so that I could become the wise child my father had wanted me to be.
The angel laughs a mocking laugh and says, softly, “Is that all?” No, no, that’s not all. Perhaps, perhaps I may have given a few moments’ thought to the house and lands, too, that would be mine if she were gone.
I don’t know how she knew, but she knew what I had done. She was not angry with me, but only gave herself over more feverishly than ever to her writing and her ancient scrolls in that damned little room. All she said to me was, “If they take me, my brother, you must hide the book I’m working on from them. There’s our father’s life’s work in that book, and you mustn’t let them destroy it.”
I promised. I could never refuse her anything, to her face.
So, one night, when it was raining hard and the wind was screaming over the rooftops, they did finally come for her. I was in the upstairs hall, leaning my head against the uneven greenish glass window above the front door, feeling the cool glass against my forehead, when I heard the cart in the distance, bumping and rumbling over the cobblestones.
They came to the door.
They knocked, with the great iron doorknocker.
My sister went down to let them in, reaching the door before any of the servants, as if the devil had told her that it was she they were seeking. She went with them without a word, and I listened to the cart rumble away until its sound was drowned in the hiss of the rain.
Then I went to the little room, where all the ancient scrolls in Greek and Latin were hidden, and, one by one, I burned them all in the vast fireplace under the tapestry of the unicorn kneeling before the Tree of Knowledge. Yes, all of them, even the huge book begun by my father and carried on by my sister.
Then I went to bed, but I did not sleep well.
The Church was good to me. The good fathers took me in and taught me Greek and Latin and the Bible and obedience. In return I worked hard for the Church all the rest of my life. They found I had a talent for sniffing out heretics, so that became my work. There were in the land at that time many false Christians who claimed that we are born again and again and that the Pope is not to be obeyed, but rather the spirit of Christ in one’s own heart. I cannot count the number of those I brought back to the Church, either through argument or prayer or, all else failing, torture. But there were many who slipped away from me, dying while still in a state of sin, and some were braver than any Christian I have known, and died with a smile on their lips, damning me with their forgiveness. It was those that smiled that haunted my sleep, more than those that screamed and pleaded. Again and again they said to me, with their last breaths, “We do not fear you, who can only harm our bodies.” I began to drink more good wine than the worst slave of sin, but nobody reproached me for it. Indeed, all my fellow heretic hunters drank too much, and some, while drunk, more than once broke their vows of chastity.
When I reached the age of fifty, I longed to die, I even prayed to die, but God does not listen to such requests, and I lived on and on and on, as if the alcohol in my blood preserved me from all decay.
I thought more and more often of my sister. I had never seen her again. I did not know if she were alive or dead, though once I heard a rumor that she had died in a nunnery, still faithful to her demonic heresy. I could not ask my superiors about her and, in truth, I preferred not to know her fate, whatever it might be.
Was I in my seventies or my eighties when I found myself at last on my deathbed, surrounded by my withered comrades in their dark robes, their faces all shadows in the candlelight? I don’t know. I no longer counted the years, or even the days.
They all knew I was dying, but they tried to cheer me with talk of all we would do when I was “up and around again.” Then the Bishop came in to give me final absolution from my sins, and that was the end of the cheerful lies. It was quite an honor, to be thus attended by the Bishop himself, and my ancient friends nodded to each other about it knowingly. I had given my life for the Church, and now I was going to get my reward.
But then, before he could begin, I raised myself on my elbow and croaked out to him, “Stop that! I won’t have it! No absolution for me!”
“What?” cried the Bishop, amazed. “But then you’ll be damned!”
“So let it be!” I rasped out. “But you can’t grant me absolution, nor can your Church!”
“Why not?” demanded the Bishop, his face turning livid with anger.
“It’s you who have damned me!” I exclaimed, then fell back on my pillow. As if from very far away I heard the Bishop going on with the ceremony, but now I was powerless to stop him, or even to speak.
“I’m damned,” I whispered to myself. “Damned. Damned. Damned.”
“Hey, don’t take it so hard just because you can’t get a hard-on,” said Marie, lifting her head from where she was uselessly sucking on my dick, my flabby, hopeless, impotent dick.
Outside, in Montmartre, it was raining, but the night people still walked the streets, shouting and laughing and pretending to have fun, and the accordion in the Lapin Agile cabaret down the street played a heavy-footed waltz. I reached over to the bedtable and poured myself a drink.
“That won’t help you fuck,” said Marie. “That’s what’s damning you, in fact, if you ask me.”
I ignored her and drank deep.
“Hey, my friend,” she said. “Were you ever a monk?”
“Hell no,” I snapped. “Do I look like one?”
“You drink a lot and can’t make love. That’s the way it is with a monk, eh?”
“I was born a second-rate piano player,” I growled. “That’s all I ever was and that’s all I ever will be.”
“You aren’t much of a lover, my friend,” she said, sitting up on the edge of the bed and reaching for her bloomers, “but I like the way you play piano, and the songs you sing. They tell the truth about what a shithouse we live in, and besides, people pay good money to hear them. That’s the important thing, if you ask me.”
“I’m damned,” I said again. “I wish I was dead.”
“Are you going to get into that? Listen, you promised me you wouldn’t try to kill yourself again, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, promise me again.”
“I won’t try to kill myself,” I said, gloomily. “Now how much do I owe you?”
“Listen, my friend. Forget it. Nothing for nothing, right? We’ve been friends so long we’re like brother and sister, eh? It’s all in the family.”
“Brother and sister? Shit. If you were my sister I wouldn’t let you sell your ass for a living.”
“How do you know, my friend? Brothers don’t always treat their sisters so very well. Now help me into my corset like a good brother. Then you can walk me down to the Gare St. Lazare. I have to catch a train.”
“Walk all that way? In the rain? Shit!”
“It’ll be good for you, my drunken brother. It’ll sober you up.”
“Oh, what the hell. All right. I don’t give a fuck!”
She stood in front of the mirror, putting on her little silver crucifix.
“What do you wear that thing for?” I asked her as I searched for my pants.
“I know what’s good for me,” she answered with a shrug.
When we were finally dressed and stumbling down the steep streets trying not to get run over by the passing horses and carriages, I asked Marie, “Where are you going, anyway, on that train?”
“I am going to make my visits,” she answered simply, clutching my arm to steady herself, though lord knows I could have used a little steadying myself.
“Visits?”
“To my family. Everyone makes visits, you know.”
“I don’t,” I told her.
“Poor man,” she said sadly. “A veritable orphan!”
“I have parents . . . right here in Paris. They have no more wish to see me than I have to see them.”
“Poor man,” she repeated.
After a while we were in the station. It was crowded as hell.
We stood together on the platform for a while, not speaking, and then she said, “Listen, my friend. I have nothing to read on the train. Can you run down to the stand and buy me a newspaper or something?”
“All right.”
“But hurry. The train is due any minute.”
I started off through the crowd, but it was slow going.
I saw an old woman sitting on a bench, and I thought she was dead because her skin was so blue, but then she moved. Old age is always horrible. Only fools see anything good in it.
“You won’t be old,” said the dark angel in my ear.
I was used to hearing strange voices when I drank too much, so I paid no attention. I just bought a few newspapers at random and started back through the milling mob.
Then I heard the train coming in, puffing and chugging and hissing like a winded dragon. And I saw it . . . or anyway the clouds of smoke it was belching out, so I tried to run, but the crowd was so thick it was like swimming in molasses. At the edge of the platform there seemed to be some clear space, so I tried to get through there.
The locomotive was coming now, drivers pumping with a slow easy roll. Then someone pushed me.
I went off balance for an instant, then fell onto the tracks, landing on my side with a painful thud. There were two thoughts in my head, before the train hit me. The first was of Marie, that she would think I had done it on purpose. The second was of my songs. “Oh, why didn’t I ever write anything down?”
Miriam apo Magdalla, when I spoke of writing down her account of the Master’s life and sayings, answered mockingly, “If Jesus had wanted a book written he would have written it himself. It was to free us from a book that He took on flesh! What need have we of a book when God speaks through us directly? Did Jesus not say, ‘The letter brings death; the spirit, life’? He who lives by a book is unfaithful to the Holy Spirit within himself, as if God, having spoken once, could never speak again. I say, on the day that men open the book of ink and papyrus, they will close the book of the Spirit, and men will no longer do good, but only devote their lives to catching each other in errors, pointing to the papyrus and saying, ‘See! I am right and you are wrong!’ Is this faith, to say that God’s words may be lost? I say, if all record of God’s words be lost, He need but say them again, and those who have ears to hear will hear. And I say further that those who love a book more than God will become murderers and torturers and liars and tyrants and be able to justify every sort of monstrous cruelty by quoting their book. God is within me, or there is no God! And if He is within me, He will tell me Himself, directly, all that I should know.”
So I left the old woman, Mad Miriam of Magdalla, without the words I had come to record on my scroll, and walked the streets of the Jewish quarter in Alexandria. A grim-faced Roman soldier passed in a chariot, red cape twisting in the hot, sand-laced wind. The wheels of the chariot were bright-painted wood rimmed with iron, and the sound of the iron clattering on the stones of the street lingered in the air long after the chariot had passed. I, an Egyptian by birth but a Greek by education, had no love for the Roman conquerors, but on these streets the sight of a servant of law and order was a welcome sight indeed, what with the riots and violence that filled our streets every night. And now night was almost upon me!
I was dressed as a Jew, and so was fairly safe from the knives of the Jews, but what if I should meet a Greek? Would I have time to tear the Jewish deep blue tassels from the hem of my tunic? What indignity! That the life of a gentleman, a scribe of the Great Library of Serapis, should hang upon a blue tassel!
And yet, would you believe it, I ventured into that lawless, bloodstained quarter again and again, drawn as if by a wizard’s spell to that strange old woman who claimed to have kissed the lips of the God-King of the Jews. There were those who said she was a witch. And more who said she was possessed by seven demons.
For my superiors, religion was but an instrument of politics, and a new gospel from this old woman would serve no other purpose than to be another means of holding down the fanatical rebelliousness of the Jews. If they must have a Messiah, let it be a Messiah of Peace, not like the others who spring from every stone in the streets of Jerusalem to raise a sword against Rome.
At first, I felt the same.
And then, who knows? Perhaps she bewitched me.
Why else would I listen to tirades like this one?
“You should have seen how grudgingly the Twelve allowed my presence by the Master’s side. Those idiots! How many times did their slow wits try the patience of my Rabbi, my Lord, my King? I, only I, really understood Him, for only the mad can know the mad. His kingdom had three ranks . . . those who know, those who only believe, and those who neither know nor believe, but only wander in ignorance. Only He and I dwelt in the highest rank, for only to us did the voices speak and the visions appear. Because of our visions, this lower world cast us out, and we lived in another, but the Twelve remained in this lower world. They chose which world they’d follow. When my Rabbi went to the stake, they ran and hid themselves while I stayed with Him to the end. In their shame they could not bear to see me or hear my scorn for their cowardice, and they quickly did what they dared not do while the Master was alive. They sent me away, saying that because I was a woman I was not worthy to be one of them. Now we hear talk that they, too, see visions, hear voices and even speak in tongues, yet I know that whoever it is that speaks through them, it is not my Rabbi! My Rabbi, in the flesh, never preached the Jewish virtues of law, work, family and ritual. When He said He had come to fulfil the Law, He meant He’d come to end it! The Law called for an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but Jesus freed us to become kind.”
Or fantastic claims like this?
“The Great Beast, Nero, is not dead forever, but will return, as shall we all, in a new body, when the time is ripe. We all come, the good, the evil, the indifferent, again and again into the world. John, the Baptist, was, before this, Elijah, the prophet, and I was before this the sister of Moses.”
No, it was a certain ring, a certain feeling that hooks the mind, in stories she told about Jesus. Like this one:
A certain Zealot asked Jesus, “If the Romans threaten our religion, should we not defend our God with the sword?”
Jesus answered, “Who is stronger, you or God?”
The Zealot said, “God, of course!”
And Jesus said, “Then God has no need of your defense. It is you who need His.”
Or another like it, about a Roman Centurion who was questioned by Jesus in the marketplace:
Jesus said to the Centurion, “Why do you need armies?”
The Centurion answered, “To defend the borders of our Empire.”
Then Jesus said, “If your Empire had no borders, what, then, would you have to defend?”
Or this one:
Jesus said, “Some build temples by laying one dead stone on another, but how can dead things ever give life? I have made my temple as a living tree is made, growing outward from the seed, and in the fruits of that tree are the seeds of new life.”
When she told a story she would then explain it, like this:
Miriam said, “The Master’s thought is like a great tree. It has many leaves and branches and bears rich fruit, but it all grew from one little seed, and that seed is that Man was created in the image of God. Everything else grows outward from that.”
I managed to write down a few of her stories from memory, but what I really needed was a full story, with a beginning, middle and end, like the scroll the Jew, Mark, had made a few years ago for the followers of Jesus in Alexandria, but more complete and bringing out more the radical pacifism of this particular Messiah. Such a document, with the authority given it by an eyewitness like Miriam, could do more to tame the blood-thirsty Jews than seven legions of Caesar’s finest.
All the news was of endless bloodshed in the war between the Romans, led by General Vespasian and his son Titus, and the Jewish fanatics in Judaea, so that at times I wondered if my mission of peace would have any effect, even if I were to produce the manuscript I felt the occasion demanded. And now, with the death of Nero, civil war broke out in Rome itself, where first one emperor, then another, laid claim to the throne of the world.
It was useless to appeal to Miriam on humanitarian grounds. She felt those Jews who put their faith in Herod’s defiled temple deserved whatever they got. It was only by chance that I finally hit upon a way to secure her co-operation.
I happened to mention Mark’s gospel to her.
“What? Mark wrote a gospel? But he never knew the Master! He was no more than Peter’s scribe! How can he write of that which he knows nothing?” she shouted, smashing her withered old fist on the table.
Jealousy! How could I have guessed that saints could be jealous? Yet it had been obvious all along.
“If you were to dictate another,” I said carefully, “perhaps Mark’s foolish impulsiveness could be corrected.”
“You’re a sly one,” she said to me. “But yes, I’ll do it. I’ll do it after all!”
I knelt at my writing table, took a reed brush from behind my ear, wet my writing ink, and waited. Miriam’s Greek was crude and ungrammatical, but I could polish it as I wrote. Together we might well produce a work of lasting value.
“But first,” she said, “you must promise me something.”
“Of course,” I said, my eagerness overcoming my caution.
“You must promise to defend the truth I give you from all those who would change or corrupt it.”
“Of course,” I easily agreed.
“Until the end of time,” she added.
“Until the end of time? How can I promise that?” I demanded.
“You will remember, from one life to the next, what you have promised to me here, even if you forget me, even if you forget everything else. Is it agreed?”
In my heart I did not believe a man has more lives than one, so why not humor the old woman? “Agreed,” I said. And so she
began:
“When he was a child, Jesus was brought here to Alexandria to escape Herod, who called himself King of the Jews, though he was neither King nor Jew. Herod slaughtered all who had rightful claim on the Jewish throne, and Jesus was of royal blood, of the House of David. Like Buddha, Jesus was born an earthly ruler, but renounced earthly rule for the other kingdom, that is not of this world. He was a student, not of one religion, but of them all, for that is what it means to be raised in Alexandria, where every god in the universe has at least one follower. From the Buddhist Theraputae by the lake He learned monasticism and meditation, from the Rabbi the whole of Jewish law and tradition, and from the shaven-headed priests of Osirus He learned how a man can save his soul by identification with a sacrificial god, and it was from them, too, that He learned baptism and the wearing of the Cross of Life. Yet He never forgot his people, the Jews, never forgot that He and His brothers and sisters were the true royal family of Judaea, and many were the times, while He was still only a boy, that He spent the whole of the night talking of the sad plight of the Jews with His cousin, John, who was later called ‘The Baptist.’ He saw, clearer than anyone else, that the Jews could never throw off the Roman rule by force of arms, and that by trying to, they would only bring down upon themselves destruction. He saw, clearer than anyone else, that the Jews had been led away from the religion of their fathers and of the prophets by the false king, Herod, and the false priests Herod appointed, and the false temple Herod built in Jerusalem.
“I knew Him then, but I did not learn holy things from Alexandria. For a young girl who has no money and cannot speak Greek like a lady, Alexander’s city of marble has other lessons to teach. I learned that there was something between my legs that I could sell again and again, yet never lose. Jesus said my cunt was like knowledge in that way, or like truth, for though all my family and friends turned away from me because of what I did, Jesus never turned away. You know that a woman is counted lower than a horse or cow in this world, but though I was a woman, and the lowest of women, Jesus spoke to me as if I were a man, and His equal, and defended me from His friends, who were forced to put up with me, at least until Jesus was dead.
“When I returned to my home in Magdalla, on the Sea of Galilee, Jesus and John returned also, and John went south to preach the things he and Jesus had learned in Alexandria, and he soon had a great following, because the people of Judaea were simple and unlearned, except in the Torah, and John had sharpened his wit in debate with the school-trained philosophers from the Alexandrian library. Even on the subject of the Torah and the Jewish traditions, there was not one Rabbi who could best him in a fair argument, and you should know that the Jews decide all things by learned argument, whether it be the origin of the universe, or the proper preparation of food, or the number of days in a year.
“But the people of that day were not content with a prophet. They called out for a Messiah, and many were the false Messiahs who stepped forward to lead them to destruction against the Romans. In all Judaea, in all the world, there was only one who, by right of blood, could be a true Messiah, and that was Jesus, the eldest prince in the House of David. So Jesus went to join John in Judaea, and I believe it was in His mind to look for some sign from Heaven that would tell Him whether or not He was truly the savior His people longed for and cried out for night and day.
“When it came, the sign was a simple thing. At other times it would have passed without notice, but it came at the exact moment that John was baptizing Him. A bird, I think it was a dove, came down and lighted on Jesus’ arm, and He ran from the water into the wilderness like a man possessed by demons.”
“Go on!” I cried. “Continue!”
“No, not now,” she said, lowering her head into her hands. “I’m an old woman, and tired. Come back again tomorrow.”
So I went away, and returned again the next day.
But it was even more dangerous than usual to pass through the streets of the Jewish quarter. The Jewish garments that kept Jewish knives away from me now invited attack not only from the Greeks, but from the Roman soldiers in Vespasian’s army, now commanded by the general’s son, Titus, since the father had become our new emperor. They had defeated the Jews in Jerusalem, but not before many a good Roman had lost his life, and the sight of a Jew could make a soldier draw his sword, particularly if the soldier was drunk. Titus was young, and the troops did not fear him as they did his father.
I breathed a sigh of relief when I was (as I thought) safely inside the filthy little hole where Old Miriam lived, and sat down to wet my ink and unroll my scroll.
It was then that a great pounding at the door destroyed any feeling of safety I might have had, and a loud, drunken voice shouted out in Latin, “Open the door, you filthy Jew bastard! We know you’re in there!”
They must have followed me, I realized with horror.
“If you won’t open the door,” came another brutal voice, “we’ll break it in!”
Calmly Miriam stepped toward the door.
“Wait!” I shouted, and drew my sword.
But as the soldiers burst in she pushed between me and them, saying scornfully, “How many times shall my Jesus and I be betrayed? How can they hurt us? Are we not immortal spirits?” And a moment later my chance to fight had passed and we were both dragged roughly into the street and bound.
Have you ever seen a man nailed to a stake? The crowd cares not how that man has lived, only how he dies, so that the most vicious, brutal, stupid murderer can win the favor of the mob if only he can say something defiant or simply keep silent and not cry out when the nails go through his wrists. Miriam died well, even after torture. Though her eyes had been put out with hot irons, still she said to the man who drove the nails, “It is not I, but you who are the prisoner.”
As for me, I thought at first to do honor to Miriam’s Jesus by saying something worthy of a gentleman, when my time came.
But instead I . . .
Instead I . . .
Instead I screamed and pleaded and wept and begged and shouted, as the nails went through my flesh and the crowd of drunken Romans and Greeks cheered. “It’s all a mistake! I’m not a Jew! I’m not a Christian! I’m an Egyptian and a Roman citizen! No! No! Don’t! For God’s sake don’t do it!”
Soon I could no longer form words, but only screams, like an animal in labor, but nobody listened to me. They only laughed at me, and drank, and threw empty wine jugs at me.
And finally, with a gesture of contempt, one of the soldiers buried his spear in my belly.
To be pierced! To be pierced! Oh, my God, have you any idea what it feels like to be pierced? Yet there’s some good in it. There’s some good. Because it is a pain that brings release from pain, one big pain that ends all the little ones.
I stood, after a while, on a vast empty plain beneath a gray, overcast sky. I was naked, and it was cold. Some distance ahead of me was a crossroads, with paths that led away from it in all directions like strands in a gigantic spiderweb. There were no trees, no grassy areas, no hills or mountains or streams or bodies of water; just bare dust in all directions as far as the eye could see.
But wait. There was something.
A lone figure was walking slowly toward me from the opposite side of the crossroads. As the figure drew closer I could see that it had wings on its back, and then, a moment later, I could make out that it had a sword in one hand and a silver cup in the other. It had long dark hair, but I could not tell for sure whether it was a man or a woman. Perhaps it was both. Perhaps neither.
It was my angel.
“Drink,” said the angel, stopping and holding out the cup to me.
“First tell me, Angel, what’s in the cup!”
“Forgetfulness.”
“There’s nothing I want to forget,” I said quickly.
The angel smiled. “Not even what you have done?”
I thought a moment. “No,” I answered, but this time with hesitation.
“Not even what was done to you?”
“No.”
“Not even the pain?”
I paused. Being pierced. If I could forget that . . .
“You must forget all or nothing,” said the angel, apparently reading my thoughts.
So. Then what is “being-pierced,” after all? Every day dead things enter my mouth and pass through my body and out my asshole. In every life my spirit pierces a new body and passes through it, coming out the other side.
“Don’t you understand?” said the angel. “I am only trying to protect you.”
“From what?”
“From the knowledge of good and evil. Only gods and angels can stand to know what evil there is in the best of earthly things. For you it is a forbidden fruit, so drink. Drink and forget.”
I needed time to think. Stalling, I asked, “Where are we?”
“This is the land of Woomtoom, beyond time and outside space. All these paths lead back into the world, at different points in history.”
“There seem to be thousands of them,” I said.
“But all are for your feet and yours alone,” said the angel. “Now drink, and return to your body.”
“No,” I said softly.
“So be it,” said the angel, pouring out the cup in the dust at his feet. I stepped forward and the angel raised his sword.
“You cannot return now,” said the winged being. “You must remain here. You can never return to the world.”
But then I remembered again that according to the Bible it was possible to wrestle with angels, and win! I pretended to lunge forward, and the angel’s sword swung downward toward me, but at the last possible split-second I sidestepped and avoided the sword at the same time as I leaned close and grabbed the angel’s arm. To his intense amazement, I threw him, with a simple Judo spring-hip throw, then threw myself onto him from the rear, in spite of his wildly thrashing wings. The sword flew harmlessly from his hand and skittered into the dust well out of arm’s reach, while I leaned in between his two wings, passed my right arm around his neck and snapped the hand back toward me so that it grasped my left arm just above the elbow. Then I placed the palm of my left hand against the back of the angel’s head, pressing forward with it while pulling back with the other.
“Give up?” I demanded.
The angel only struggled all the harder.
I tightened the choke hold.
“What do you say now?” I asked coldly.
There was no answer, only more thrashing and writhing. I squeezed harder, and the struggling grew weaker and finally ceased. I held the choke a little longer, just to make sure, then let go. The angel rolled over in the dust, completely limp.
I listened for his heartbeat, felt for his pulse.
There was nothing. The angel was dead.
I picked up the sword and the empty cup and, choosing a direction at random, began walking.
I opened my eyes and looked up at the Hindu hypnograph on the lower face of the upper bunk above me. Nearby the tape spun uselessly in my tape recorder. Flap flap flap flap.
I sat up and turned the machine off.
By the clock only about an hour had passed. It seemed more like two thousand years.
I was still pretty high, but I knew, somehow, that the peak of the “trip” had passed. I got dressed and went downstairs.
The mail had come. It was lying next to the front door, under the mail slot. I picked it up and glanced over it. There were two form letters, one from the John Birch Society and one from the Peace and Freedom Party. They both wanted me to join their organizations. Each wanted my help in fighting the other.
I took a coin from my pocket and looked at it for a while, smiling to myself.
Then I flipped it.