vOYAGE:O'Side

by Francis Kroncke

CHAPTER 25

  “Women’s Liberation.” The phrase was grinding. At least that’s how Frank began to feel it. At first it was amusing—he had to admit that he’d been amused. Watching girls jump up and fumble in their bumbling imitation of the macho of a third string basketball practice squad. Just like girls’ basketball. Would he have to confess this? Now, in these Inquisitorial Times? Twist the garrote around his own throat—by his own hand? Stand up and say, “I’m a Male Chauvinist Pig!” No, more. “I’m a Male Chauvinist Capitalist Running Dog Pig of the Ruling Class!” Or, maybe just, “Pig, I am.” And grovel on all fours oinking his way, head snuffling and snorting the ground, at their feet.

  Pig.

  So, in some way, he understood, in the depth of his gut, Jack and Sarge. “Fags.” And as fags, not pigs—just “queers.”

  Frank was annoyed—it buzzed his mind space—that he so clearly grasped the Fag intellectual option—avoid, finesse, juke, side—step…“Just call me Dalores, sweetie!” He almost punched Sarge…almost cold-cocked him. Ha.

  She shook him. It seemed like an earthquake, avalanche. “What?!” But he immediately knew “what.”

  Having roused him, she left for the bathroom.

  Fucking-A—he hoped that the champagne was still chilled, if not actually cold. As he rubs his eyes and kicks the sleep down and off his right leg, he quickly reviews his checklist: food put away, candles snuffed, presents wrapped…Did I put that bottle back in the fridge?

  “Sorry.” In a fluster; half true.

  “Me, too.” And with her admission he checks the clock: 2 a.m.

  Covering. Protecting. Caring: “Guess we shouldn’t be crucified on Cartesian time!” Weak humor. Actually, a stratagem: he wants a happy anniversary celebration—even if it’s a day late.

  Dalores doesn’t laugh. Isn’t smiling. More than just tired, this Frank reads in the avoidance of her eyes—eyes which never avoid him...eyes, one of the reasons they married so quickly. Dalores could look right into, inside Frank...she didn’t say that, didn’t say that she could probe him like a laboratory rat and measure him with her psychic tools, but it was something like that. Frank liked this, liked Dalores’ eyes…it was what he unconsciously became at the gravesite: unseen.

  Now, at This Moment—no Dalores eyes.

  How did the unseeing begin?

  At this time it was as later on...he saw himself not being seen by her but by himself. She had always consumed him with her eyes. “Your socks have holes—your big right toe.” And, “You shouldn’t’ve spooned that piece of cake, I told you so.” These and so many…so many: details.

  Dalores has always seen Frank in details. Details which were unknown to Frank; unobservable by his observing parts: eyes, ears, hands, tongue. Now, he was seeing Dalores in detail—this was what startled him.

  He wanted to say but it stuck like quick-pour concrete: Your breasts have been moulded by a thousand hands! Your face has been kissed by a million lips! Your cunt has been licked by adoring throngs! But he couldn’t: he saw the details; could not speak them.

  But she came to him, anyways.

  Disrobed and turned—in her own mind, blazed out towards him. In her own mind—all the fires of all the desires of all the women she had just loved, had been loving, would ever love: these, these were present to him through her.

  She of the thousand breasts.

  She of the embracing arms and arms and arms…arms.

  She of the kisses which opened like stiletto cuts. Openings which she offers to him: body with a gadzillion openings, all and each dripping with the blood of thirst, thirst for his soul, thirst for him...for his Final Cut.

  She of the cunt which was river, and as river for him to ride upon, sail, voyage, adventure…river which mated with river to become ocean which mated with ocean to become the world—a single solitary drop of absolute Offering.

  She, Dalores.

  What Frank had found with Bertha had been elusiveness. “What you see is not what you get!” He remembered the magical insight interred in the footnotes of Frazier and Bachofen; Paracelsus and John Dee…inside the alchemical flask.

  As he grew in arcane, esoteric and cabalistic knowledge, so he grasped—a humbling, “tell no one else” insight that all he had been was the Sorcerer’s Apprentice—here, Bertha being the flask and he just lighting the wick on the burner. Sorceress’ Apprentice?

  He, Frank—pregnant!

  What Frank had found with Dalores had been concreteness. It was an educated word, one of philosophical cant but it leaked into “earthiness” and “groundedness”—other current but too hip words for his own sense of self importance. But it was how she made him feel: secure, there—but somehow soft...Frank felt this, felt it deeply—he sat down upon Dalores, more accurate.

  Earth Mother—she was grass and the trees and small birds flying...she came to him in hippie dress: tie-dyed burst of smock; hair held back, braided by simple twine, spreading rocks thick and thin, from yard and park, thick bends of twigs, a decaying branch which held a staggering of incense sticks: bowls of water with simple flowers swimming, several bowls here and there: sweet soaps, handmade, lavender, patchouli, sandalwood…always a slight air about her...nothing like the event of Bertha: no lightning, no tornado, no run to the root cellar, rather, heaviness upon the obvious: seduction of satiety after a heavy lunch of thick seven-grain loafs and home-gardened tomatoes and cucumbers and radishes, lettuce in the spring: canned for the winter, pickled, prepared...Dalores was preparation—preparing in the small ways, the unnoticed ways, but a preparation which resulted, as such meticulous and instinctual preparations do, in marvelously baked breads!

  Bread—Dalores is home baking.

  Dalores now watching him, observing him, seeing but seeing more...seeing through and beyond—seeing with the eyes of her collective, of The Corn as her communal gathering named itself, this same night seeing through and beyond—peering with Frank’s body, not stopping at its edge, not just fondling him, sucking him, licking him, snuggling him...not her most fondest of images and pleasures but here nursing him..not now the milk but her roots, roots seeping into him, entangling him, wrapping themselves around his psyche like a coil…“Devour them!” Bertha had shouted at tonight’s meeting of The Corn—it had frightened Dalores, but then that had been before her now last moment before her own Devouring.

  Devouring—on the edge of the group, circular, in the next to last circle of three, just being not-of-herself so that she could be of the group, a practice to lessen egotistic energy—each being a stalk of corn, just one so as to become many: roots, sharing rootage, what is not seen...where the sun does not shine!...yet reaching up towards the common goal, the conscious goal—to be sun-filled: to be Son-Filled, this the myth of the Outside World, of the seen world, of what is...they celebrate this world—celebrate it in its forgetfulness of who they really are: Roots. Champagne. Candles. Lavender incense. Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” His setting. To celebrate her. To proclaim her: “Intoxicating!” “Fire of my Heart!” “Fragrance of my desire!” Schubert to seduce...not in his conscious mind, but as to his instinctual training...without words, not his but this ancient song, to adore her as he only knew to adore her—as “Mother of my child!”—but not to shout that one, not to exclaim it—Blessed Mother: Holy Mary—not even to think it, sensitive to the misinterpretations of the day, no, he would let the music of centuries do his work.

  “I adore you” is what he would say: Ave Maria!

  Then float down from his cloud and inseminate her with his own intoxicating, fiery, fragrant and godly self.

  Devouring—all at once, the shock of roots becoming herself as root, turning without moving and being now all the breasts which she sees: twenty-some—odd breasts, of all shapes and sizes, flitting through her mind in Outside words—boobs, teats, knockers, bags, bazooms, bazongas, apples, balloons, chubbies, cream-jugs, dugs, dumplings, melons, hooters, love tips, ma
racas, marshmallows, nuggets, wallopies, peaches, watermelons, upper-deck, milk-bottles, nubbies, oranges, diddies, gazongas…Milky Way—shuddering to a halt at Milky Way, for this was proper, proportionate: all these, together, cosmic…like shooting stars and flocks of asteroids and swirling planets around herself as Eternal Source...so all came: each passing through her by becoming her—her individuality their common body...kissing her lips to become their lips, stroking her forearm to become their forearm, licking her clit to become their clit, hugging her to become their hug...each and all one skin…Dalores: a common thought...“Dalores,” a common word...the only word—word unto deafness, for she can no longer hear her word, no longer sense her nose, no longer wiggle her toes, no longer lay down and spread her legs…

  “Frank…you’re ever so thoughtful.”

  Stated in that way Dalores has always spoken to him, with gratitude for the simplest of things he does...gratitude for his being, this, how she made him concrete. How she became in her flesh what the house was in its architecture…somehow when she first closed the door as he set her down on their Wedding Day (“April Fools!”)—having picked her up and carried her over the threshold: Tradition!— there was the knowing that the house had let her close it...truly shut it against what was not them…a shutting which was their marriage vow.

  “Frank!” Sighed...exhaled...lofted—a fog word, for as she said his name in this way—says it now—so Frank became undone...all that was him and within him became hers—she milked him, wrung him out, thrashed him, ridding him of chafe, ground his bones to make her bread…he loved it—the thought and her presence as “Earth Mother” …not just the bouncing abundance of her breasts, but, yes that—Scandinavian. Icelandic. Somewhere North so that as he first touched her he felt a chill, a throttling cold leaking inside the warmth of her plentiful moons…his mind flushes purple and sentimental and totally bonkers as he nestles into her…she nursing him, feeding him, healing him, comforting him—this gifted him the image of her as “Earth Mother”...it is what she had come to want for herself.

  Devouring—others had talked, she had listened, asked questions...there were the secretive smiles, the “knowing” glances of those who “had done it,” yet she had not done it, not felt drawn to it, actually, repulsed by the not so uncontrolled macho threat of it all: “’Fraid to do it?”

  Almost like the first time a guy—not just a guy but her First: Anthony Salvador Fraticelli, like then—part invitation, part taunt, almost all a threat...to her being, to her place, to her sense of herself, so she had listened to them all, most closely to Bertha...but so much of Bertha was—Well? Simply bragging.

  Dalores couldn’t see Frank in Bertha. No matter who said what or when or why…maybe the others knew, maybe some of them knew, Maybe no one knows?

  Dalores couldn’t remember it happening—thought that to herself just as that thought dissolved...no other word works for her—dissolving: this was the transition, the transforming thought, that which took her to the other side: Other body, no, Other soul, no…Other presence: devouring.

  She’s delivered!

  Smug. Satisfied. Satiated. His actual words. Exclamation and all.

  Falling asleep, eyelids like farm yard door shutting root cellar.

  He sleeps.

  Devouring—they wanted her body, she gave them her body. Every millimeter of flesh. Every molecule of breath. Every measure of every border: body, mind, soul and spirit.

  They want to devour me. So here is me!

  Sacrifice. Expiation. Redemption. Purification. Consummation. Transubstantiation. No such words were hers, possibly theirs, certainly his.

  Even they did not know. How could they know? They were women!

  “Women don’t know how to fuck!” That was the clarion call—the denunciation and the annunciation.

  “Devour!” That’s what some said. “It’s the only way. Not to accept any of their limits. None of their shackles and chains on us. Not our cunts. Not our analysis. Not our actions!”

  Revolutionaries. How so many styled themselves as Devourers.

  But Dalores devouring...at first herself, but, then, them.

  Frank’s now sleeping. Slug. Like a slug sheeted and blanketed in her bed. A Sci Fi movie: “The Twilight Zone”—a man-size slug next to her. Sluggish on so many levels. “But sluggish no more!” is thought for Dalores.

  Walking around him. Around the bed as she can...wall blocking her physical passage, so she imagines herself and astrally walks—in so imagining, does circle round the bed.

  Blessing him. Each corner of the room. Blessing with The Winds. Blessing with The Sky Points. Blessing with Salutation to the Cosmos.

  Singing. Humming and strumming her own breath, her own tune, herself a note and a chord and a rhythm as she walks and imagines and is just there.

  Devouring—what is other, what is not, what is not which is, which is her but not her, which devouring of her is of all hers...taking within her every sucking and probing finger and piercing tongue but most of all: imaginings…she imagines them: not just what they are or who they think they are or how they present themselves to her but as they dissolve into her and through her—her imagination being the catalyst...this the devouring: imagining.

  When Frank awoke he knew that he was not fully awake. Not just awaking to that near sleepy state Swedenborg so favored, no, it was like he knew that he would never be awake as he had always before wakened—turning to her and feeling both that oneness and that separateness which he had always felt...waking to image himself—though he really didn’t like the image it came...hammered itself to him—of being “spent”—like a nut shell or an empty bullet casing: “spent”…she there with something of him inside her...seeing himself like the pea inside the pod: himself “lost” inside her—this type of waking was not his today.

  As if he had asked, she turns: half-rolls towards him as if his wakefulness woke her…her smile conveyed it all, I’m pregnant.

  Frank misses Dalores.