The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

  The first day she was there, the librarian behind that counter—though a stranger to her—seemed to recognize her. Instead of paranoia, Trisha felt a relief that came from so deep within her she could not be sure it was from her own nervous system. The books populating shelves in that rented storefront were not of the sort Trisha usually read, and she turned up her nose at titles by figures such as Aleister Crowley to such an extent that she began to edge her way back to the library’s entrance. How was she to leave without offending the librarian, who tried not to stare at her only visitor? But it was then Trisha noticed it again: The Cosmic Connection, sitting on a display labeled “Staff Picks.” Beneath this book sat four others: Synchronicity, by psychiatrist Carl Jung, another book published just the year before; Robert Anton Wilson’s (again, brand-new) book on goddess worship, The Book of the Breast; the cumbersomely titled but intriguing work of a Dr. John C Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer; and—much to her displeasure, for she had already resolved to check out all the books on that display before she laid eyes on it—Aleister’s Book 4. His guidebook on magic with a k. Screw it. As she collected the books, she told herself that she did not enjoy every book her university professors crammed into their curriculums, either.

  When she dropped the tomes on the front counter and asked, “How much to join the library? It’s private, right,” the librarian perked.

  “For one week only, it happens to be free. You picked a lucky day to come in!”

  The penniless student strongly suspected luck had nothing to do with it, and the contents of those four books would confirm it—not just their printed contents, but their actual, physical contents. The great irony of it all was she would, in some months, come to hold Crowley in high regard; the entity that he called the Scarlet Woman would then seem the Lady to her in all but name. But at the end of 1974, with those first four books fresh in her dorm, what should slide out of the Lilly volume? Not a proper bookmark, or the usual haphazard replacements for one such as the standard receipt or old grocery list or expired movie ticket. Nothing usual by any means when the baggie containing six cartoon-printed tabs of LSD dropped into her lap. Extremely considerate on the part of the last reader (or that librarian), since Mr. Lilly’s techniques utilized the chemical. Such a thing could have been dangerous, but Trisha was (almost) a scientist. Though she had not so much as smoked a cigarette, she felt, in the wake of her vision, that she already had experience in the neighborhood of psychedelics.

  Alone, she took two tabs of the acid; two weeks later, she ceased her classes in favor of more important studies. Four years later, while intermittently working a few menial part-time office jobs, Tish volunteered a handful of hours at a battered women’s shelter—a new inspiration that had come to her the morning after a later acid trp. All the workers, she sensed, knew the Lady. They put on a very good act of pretending they didn’t know her when she first started coming by; but there was a deliberateness about all the things they said and did that Trisha’s senses declared to be somehow false. The shelter, like her new apartment, was in Claremont, but whether out of his embarrassment, her shift of interests, or the manipulations of the Lady, she never bumped into her would-be suitor after the event he surely remembered as a mugging. Just as well; he would have monopolized her valuable time, which she increasingly sensed to be short.

  Then, one day, she saw him on the news. The Hierophant. Not being interviewed, featured, or anything like that. A blink-and-miss-it glimpse of his familiar face looming in the background of joyous Catholics celebrating the election of Pope John Paul II. Just there, smiling, filling some space in the news broadcast’s B-roll. Maybe wondering if Trisha saw him.

  The next day, she began to write a book that would be published in secret by a company suggested by that librarian, who had become Trisha’s best friend since the tragedy of 1974. Every month, Tish came in to return her books, and lo! There would be a new display, with new, auspicious texts to elicit in her frontal lobe a kind of urgent itch. Any guilt for abandoning her academic path was tempered by the notion that she had replaced it with another—one more in need of an objective, scientific mind than any discipline she had seen.

  At the same time, she began to understand why so many occult books descended into rambling, or why its practitioners seemed crazed fools. It was impossible to describe the experience in a linear way. It was impossible to recognize what the anthropologist had called “the pattern,” this great chain of symbolic similarities spread across culture, medium, and intention (or lack thereof). Cultures that had never known one another bore profound similarities. Historical figures superficially unrelated became linked in subtle ways that often related to magical practices or drug use. She at last understood what Christianity was secretly speaking about, and recognized it was identical to the thing everybody else spoke about. Her reflexive anti-religious stance began to relax. Trisha at last saw spirituality for what it was: a model. A model for reality, like a mathematical model, or any other.

  Finally, five years to the evening of the incident, she returned to the hotel on the off chance that the worshipers of the Lady communed again that night. Behind the counter, why— who should be there but that little librarian. Five years of chatting, and Trisha had never realized she had a night job. As she had the first time they met, the girl perked, and Tish could only think to ask, “I’m inquiring about the convention.”

  “Yes, Miss Robbins. An invitation for this Saturday’s event has been left for you.” Smiling, the librarian-slash-concierge placed a red envelope upon the counter between them. “I was told to say they look forward to seeing you.”

  “‘They’?”

  “The convention members, of course.”

  “And what is the name of the convention?”

  “Our hotel’s administrative staff is not permitted to divulge such information,” said the chipper young woman. “They look forward to seeing you there.”

  Was the hotel in on it, too? They must have been. Who wasn’t in on it? The day came and she glitzed herself up as much as possible while still maintaining modesty, more anxious every second. Suppose it did just turn out to be a bunch of prostitutes? Some weird trap? Human trafficking? Yet as she parked her car down the street and trotted up to the growing influx in her awkward heels, a few women turned to greet her. In that instant they recognized her, and she, also, recognized them: the Bearers, they had called themselves. The Native woman, who this year sported the most elaborate of all her sisters’ updos, extended her hand.

  “Well,” said that woman, whose name was unknown, but who could not be called a stranger. “Are you coming?”

  XVI

  Enthousiasmos

  If somebody told young Miki Soto that, as an adult, she (or her body) would lead a battle that would end the world as man and martyr knew it—well, suffice to say she’d have been pretty dubious. She had never believed she would be in a battle, period! Tell her to march, and she’d have laughed in your face between bites of a burger that never seemed to affect her delicate weight. Secretly, she worked hard to keep off the excess pounds. Her mother had always told her if she made exercise part of her routine, she would never have to think of it; and that had been a necessary advisement, since she’d been a pretty chubby kid! But, then, she’d also been a very depressed kid, and food had been her most comforting and nonjudgmental friend. A sandwich neither recognized nor cared what gender she was, so a sandwich didn’t obliviously remind her, sentence after sentence, reference after reference, conversation after conversation, for the first seven years of life, that the whole world—even her own mother—thought she was a boy.

  Oh, she never blamed them. It was a natural, though flawed, assumption to think that something with a penis wanted to have that penis, or felt like that penis belonged to it. But Miki had hated, hated, hated the thing from the instant she was conscious of the difference. Potty training, a time of trauma for all children, had been a horrible revelation for her; and as her
interest in dolls or her mother’s elaborate wardrobe was spurned as “weird” and “effeminate,” she could not but feel a constant sting of pain, which turned into bitterness against God, which was easy to transmute into self-loathing. Maybe this was because she felt her mother would have loved her from the start if only she’d been born into the right body. Then Miki wouldn’t have had to deal with seven years of displaced misandry and deep resentment for which Yoriko would spend the rest of her daughter’s life repenting once the truth was fully communicated.

  To Yoriko’s credit, Miki had given up trying to communicate her gender around the age of five, so for the two years in which the child most grappled the issue, there was nothing Yoriko could have done. But the ultra-popular geisha—who spent vast amounts of time busy in e-zine hologram shoots and meetings to approve overpriced galactomyces-based beauty serums for her growing brand—might have had a chance to correct the problem had she picked up on the five years of clues exhibited by an increasingly emotional child. She had reacted to Miki’s mischief involving her clothing with fury for a boy who had no respect for his mother’s things, rather than with the relative impatience she would have shown a girl who only wanted to imagine she would someday be as beautiful as her very splendid mother.

  But no matter how cruel and blind that mother was, Miki did not blame her; Miki blamed the divine, and herself. Only the cruelest of deities would put her into this body, this wrong body, so that the whole world would mock her without even knowing it. She decided perhaps she had done something wrong in a past life to merit such an existence—a tragic thing for a child to think, but natural given her culture’s teachings about reincarnation. She wept every night for how hard an otherwise easy existence became when one was told every day they were someone they weren’t. Amid her weeping, she sought an explanation. There had to be some reason, damn it. She couldn’t accept that the universe was so unjust as to do this to her for no reason—to take from her the thing she felt would make her existence the smooth ride she deserved.

  It would take Miki many years to understand that the life of a woman was hard. As a child in the wrong body, biological females seemed to have it so easy. The issues were all so simple then. If they wanted to look pretty, no one would stop them; if they played with dolls, that was fine; if they lived in the culture Miki did and fantasized about being a beautiful, famous geisha like Yoriko, people thought it fairly normal (though not necessarily ideal). Of course, there was something deeper to Miki’s envy of biological females; something that she could not articulate at such a young age. They were allowed to be themselves. That was all she saw of women, and it slayed her with jealousy. She did not understand then that the life of a woman was still, even in 4012 CE, rife with danger. Issues like rape and sexism were not time-specific problems, or even human problems; they were mortal problems. They were problems with existence, and would always be there so long as conscious beings had free will enough to make the wrong choices.

  When Miki was seven, Yoriko was raped by a client. The geisha decided to retire from her career to focus on her skin-care line, whose profits she now partially dedicated to a foundation responsible for investigations that Kyoto police did not prioritize. That was to say, sex crimes against sex workers. Yoriko did not approve of the “lifestyle” of women who sold their bodies, she explained to Miki once, long after she had learned her daughter’s identity. The geisha thought the higher ideal was to make oneself into an untouchable piece of art, like a painting behind glass. The rape, therefore, had not just been a repugnant invasion of the temple of her body. In Yoriko’s mind, the rape was some strange slight to her vanity—and Miki could tell you that vanity was Yoriko’s foremost trait. The assault “reduced” her to the level of “mere” sex worker, which was perhaps why the old bat began to deal more compassionately with them. It was certainly why her anger problems exploded.

  Miki did not understand all that at the time, of course. She only understood her mother was home much more often, sleeping much more often, and angrier than ever when she was awake. A bad grade or a missed chore (keeping in mind Miki was barely seven years old) could now elicit a slap once reserved for back-talking or outlandish displays of disobedience. Those few activities they enjoyed together disappeared. Very benign things, like visiting Kyoto’s elaborate rooftop gardens, or taking the train to Osaka’s amusement park, or going up to Hokkaido for some fresh crab (oh! Natural flesh from the sea was better than anything fake modeled off land mammals)—no more. Miki was more alone than ever in their big, empty, Western-style house, and struggling with more self-loathing, too. Day on day, she told herself none of this would be happening if she had only been born in the right body. Then, her mother would be warm—friendly to her the way she was to women, not cold and businesslike the way she was with every non-client man Miki had ever observed. Clients got the warm treatment from Yoriko until her retirement—but even while she worked, she would come home at night, swipe off her makeup, and complain to her child, “Men! They’re all such bullying, tedious wastes of space. Thank goodness for artificial insemination! Don’t you ever grow up to be like that, Minoru-kun. Listen to a woman now and then, instead of yammering all the time. Ugh! I thought if I had to listen to him for another minute I was going to vomit all over the tatami. Finally I fed him so much sake he fell asleep, the idiot. His wife will have to come drag him home…her problem now!”

  These things would have been cruel to say to a child who was really a boy; but to say it to a child who was secretly a girl was the height of spitefulness. Every night, Miki learned with increasing clarity that her mother could never, ever love her for as long as the child was called “Minoru.” At least, this was what Miki convinced herself—and it was not far from the truth, but it was still a mistake on the child’s part to allow these negative feelings, seven months after Yoriko’s retirement, to drive a suicide attempt.

  Of course: Was it a total mistake? Without that night of despair, elicited by a slight so small in the grand scheme of life that Miki couldn’t even recall it as an adult, she might never have had her vision of the Lady. She might never have gone on to become Her avatar. One second, the girl was hanging from the handle of her closet door, and the next minute she fell through her floor, slipping between Plancks into another space. Into a Lady’s arms.

  Oh, Miki, said that glowing kami upon whom the child trembled to look, and upon whose face was written a compassion surmounting that of any living being. I didn’t know.

  Miki? How strange. If she was startled to hear herself addressed by a name she had never heard, she was all the more startled to find she knew the name was her real one. It was in her surprise that Miki looked down at her body and hiccupped into tears. She was not a child at all, and certainly not trapped in the body of a chubby boy. She was a beautiful woman, dressed in a kimono more elaborate than even those in which designers begged to dress her mother. As her watering eyes disrupted the vision of the herons upon the gossamer fabric, she cried, “I’m a woman!”

  Of course you are. This is your real body. The kami released Miki, for it knew she wished to hold herself. The body you will have in the future.

  “The future…my future.” Lifting a sleeve to hide her tears, the girl said, “But I don’t have a future. I can’t live like this, hidden away. I can’t live with her. I’d rather die!”

  You are a butterfly, Miki, as is every caterpillar. Time has yet to unveil it, and you have many more years before you will make your cocoon. But caterpillars can be very beautiful; they can be themselves.

  “I can’t,” she lamented. “My mother hates me.”

  She doesn’t understand, and is an unfair woman. Would she but loved you no matter who you were! But she does not see that she abuses that which she most treasures. It is the caterpillar’s mother, sweet Nature, who grants her beautiful colors before she even has wings. Show your mother that you will someday be a butterfly, and she will color you. At the girl’s fearful silence, the entity urged, She will unders
tand if you tell her in the moment she finds you.

  “Who are you?”

  You don’t know me yet. Someday…but that is not me. It is a version of me. I am more than that, now; and I never will be that again.

  “Then, what are you now?”

  The kami did not speak. It merely wiped a tear from Miki’s cheek, then cast that tear into the black abyss around them. There, the droplet expanded into a form that Miki would never find concrete words to describe. A tesseract, perhaps, or the E8 lattice—both were the close concepts upon which she would someday come, but even these did not describe the visual experience of the object. This lotus of intense beauty that possessed an infinity of shimmering, shifting petals, each containing an infinity of its own. To look upon it, Miki felt the weight of all of time, and could feel for an instant her own future understanding of this, this experience, which at that time was simply alarming and hypnotic. Someday she would understand that this object was the same that Trisha perceived in the form of the DNA double helix; but she would still not fully, personally, manage to articulate what it was, even when living in the Kingdom with Kahlil.

  Nonetheless, looking upon it in that place, she could sense her life was but a pinpoint in the timeline of existence. Smaller than a pinpoint—smaller still. She sensed that the length of time between herself and her true body was not so great as it felt to a mind that had lived not quite eight years. Indeed, Miki was practically nothing at all. But it was inarguable that she was something, for there, in a facet within a facet within a facet, behold!

  The worried face of her mother, shaking her awake.

  There were many other things she saw, too, in little half-had glimpses: another life as a maid, the motion of hands and a clatter like keys; but all these she forgot as the face of her mother gained in clarity. The many lotus petals of that multidimensional fractal folded the rest of the universes away and left her with the one called, to her, “reality.”