vOYAGE:O'Side

by Francis Kroncke

CHAPTER 41

  Evil Innocence.

  AxZ performed the story of Adam and Eve, again. Again, being how excited she became—again, as she presents him: Adam.

  “You did it the same way, again!” Frustration; a purplish blah.

  “This is boring,” who else but SxZ?

  “You’re just ribbing us,” flat, monotoned, aware of the play on words, but not wanting the chuckle, rather its opposite: dead serious.

  “Am I the Great Surgeon or what?” AxZ teases.

  BxZ: “Ribs. Bones. Parts of bodies. Exchangeable. One into the other. One having the other within it. Could just as well be the most creative of intimate love stories. Rip out my bones to make your bread—right?!”

  “You speak little, but profoundly my little one.”

  (I already imagined that!)

  “Ribbet, ribbet, ribbet…” and the locale picks up the hoarse, harsh echo: “Ribbet, ribbet, ribbet!”

  “Kiss me!” AxZ croaks.

  SxZ: “One thing,” the others are especially drawn by the absolute depth of the tone, “why are we here?”

  The Conundrum’s conundrum—Ah!

  CxZ: “Where’s here?” titters.

  AxZ: “Land ho!” shocks the locale: a blanched whiteness pervades.

  SxZ: “No!” urgently; frantic—the Last Gulp!

  “Really, this is consciousness?”

  “Yes.”

  “This, how, why we entered the Conundrum?”

  AxZ smiles indecipherably.

  “It can’t be, can it?”

  The others are all a hum. SxZ fights off the hum.

  “Flesh is only when Eve is created.”

  “She skins Adam, so to speak. Makes him her map?”

  “Then there is flesh of flesh down through time.”

  “Flesh, the skin of time. The body, you mean. A boundary, the map which lives and dies.”

  “In this Garden, before Eve—who or what was Adam.”

  SxZ: “Us. Confound it all! Us!”

  In deep sleep

  “We’re here because we’ve been there.”

  “True.”

  “But I don’t believe I ever was.”

  AxZ: “Before. You have a sense, a feeling, a color...there’s the hum of before. This is true?”

  “I don’t accept this.”

  “What’s to accept? There’s the Story. You heard the Story, right? It means something to you? It raises the vibrational flux here in the Conundrum, true?”

  “Accepted.” SxZ: “No wonder this bugs me the way it does. I want to yell, Asshole! Is that a sign? An omen?”

  A fierce coldness shrills the locale. Several dissipate.

  “Before Eve there was no flesh, no consciousness, no dreaming, no conundrum, no time, no Story, no presence, no intercourse.”

  “If not,” BxZ, “ maybe because they are insignificant?”

  “Are you insignificant?”

  “With Eve came The Embrace? From without the deep sleep: dreaming.”

  “Ah,” AxZ, exhales slowly, thoughtfully, patiently, “and so Evil?”

  “The Embrace? …I can work with that,” Lonny.

  “Look,” Janet, “it’s like my potting. You place ring upon ring upon ring and soon there’s a mug, a vase, something else, just from winding the same rope. Voila! When we come together, we embrace, one on one, one on many. That’s got to work?”

  Red Fox: “I still prefer Family. Everyone’s family. Everyone’s someone’s child. This is most profound. In my tribe every child was everyone’s child.”

  SunBlossom: “Everyone must parent, be a father and mother. That’s the Quaternity. The Four Square.”

  “More like Pandora’s Box,” Pat chimes in; sarcastically.

  Lonny: “What happened when Eve embraced Adam for the first time?”

  Alicia begins to answer, then halts: confounded.

  “She saw behind him.”

  More than a moment’s pause.

  Confused: “What’s behind?”

  Kunja: “The Snake. Goddam it, The Snake!”

  BxZ: “The Snake?”

  Ocher riffs echo as others are grasping the Story’s fresh insight.

  AxZ: “If The Snake, then, where did it come from?”

  “Him. Not it. The Father of Lies. C’mon, Great Seer, don’t blind-eye us!”—SxZ.

  “Do you think Eve didn’t see The Snake?”

  “How would she even know it was a snake?”

  “Ha. Here’s where you get the hint. That she’s been in the Garden, before.”

  “Before Adam?”

  Janet: “This is not good Catholic doctrine!” a belly of laughs; sniggers.

  Bertha: “When a man’s inside you, hasn’t he been there before?” She waits for the subtle whisper to penetrate her Sisters’ ears. “Your clit. It was chopped down to make his penis, would any of you deny that?”

  “Are we dreaming, O Great Seer?” Plea. Imploration. Seeking Redemption.

  “This is the Conundrum, my little ones. What was the Garden, if not an aspect, a dazzle of this Conundrum?”

  SxZ: “Oh, my, my, my, my….” faking sincerity; innocence.

  “All told, Adam is the Innocent, not Eve?”

  She clambers off the bed, sucking his seed up her asshole, sucking him in through her back-door, dragging her face on the ground, grinding it into the swept dirt, crushing her cheeks, seeking a scar, a permanent sign of his Dominion…laughing inside herself, seeing with her Third Eye his posturing—his submitting of Jerd and of so many...the proud way he now strokes his cock, holds the fagged little snake in his hands, cupping it exultant in power, praising himself, letting the ravaging lust fire through his blood—his eyes see himself grown four kin high...it is his sword, his lance, his one-is-one with God The Father Almighty.

  Darlm craftily sequesters herself in a darkened corner of their lodge: squats there and expels his seed from her ass—seed fertilized by her own foulness...with this she is to raise up his children: inseminate herself...for from him she will never again receive innocent seed—Lon having instructed—“All that is and is about will be ours. The Great War has begun! The Shade shall totally eclipse the Moon and the Sun!”

  “Jant’s question—it’s not nonsense?”

  “Well. Tell me.”

  “Men are supposed to have the babies?”

  AxZ: Frustrates and consternates a puke green. All recoil.

  SxZ: “She embraces Adam and sees The Snake. She already knows The Snake. The Snake is—The Father’s penis?”

  The Mother’s clit.

  Bertha: “My Sisters, have you dreamed the dream?”

  The Mother’s Clit—a body which is all that is...directionless and so all directions...four-square and four-dimensional, yet dimensionless and all dimensions...shaking the tree—But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat.

  “Shake it!” and so ordered Frank tenderly rubs her clit, feeling it become a firm stump, and as firm so he imagines it as a stick-shift, moving her by degrees, harder pressings this way, then that...popping the clutch!...each shift plunging her, revving into more fierce and impassioned insanity of pleasure, feeling that this stump has stuck itself into his finger, a pinprick, a needle’s poke...it germinates and unfolds up through his index finger into his palm up his arm around and across his shoulders up into his brain his third eye down into his tongue—it is his tongue, tongue joltingly locked onto his penis, working in harmony, unison, moving, plunging, swaying, pressing...it is his way into her, microscopic, minuscule, tiny—they are one: his cock her clit their tongues his fingers her body…The Great Mother—O Great Mother!—Lon lays her axe to The Tree: Tree of Life Evergreen...axes it...lets it thud to the ground, bounce and roll till it ceases to be—knowing it as no longer alive...all its greenery but mask...now fit only for time, the erosion of time:
the seasons.

  She lets loose a bellowing, fierce and cloud-shattering yell, “Kill!”

  The locale is dark...festering darkly; opaque...pitch beyond tar—as Innocence had been their play, now Evil.

  Friar Otto: “Lord, God my Almighty Father, I have fought the good fight. I have slain your Enemy. I have run the course.” Desperate, sobbing, wracked with guilt, shame, a sense of filthiness: “Why? O why? O why do I feel so lost? Damned?!”

  Lonny: “The Mother is also Dark. Evil. Kali—this too obliterated in the Bible. All Light, no Shade! We have only Innocent Women. Wronged Women. Forgotten Women. Enslaved Women. Should we trust this Slaughter of the Innocents story?”

  Janet: “My mother would never raise her voice. Mary never raised her voice. She said this so often that I took it to be true.”

  Anna: “How in God’s name did she know that?”

  Bertha gives Anna a crossed and shut-up glare.

  Red Fox: “Why do we have to accept Evil? Maybe it’s just a delusion?”

  Delusion?

  “Maybe instead of looking back—that’s what all this analysis of the Bible and the Snake and all that—all you’re doing is looking back—why not look forward? Accept that we can—if not Restore—then that we can Replenish the human soul, the spirit. Make something new happen?”

  Thick silence. Stuffed. Constipated. Meditative. Unsure of itself.

  “Those who don’t know their myths are fated to repeat their failures—something like that. Who said that? Not important. Aren’t you being a bit perfectible?”

  “Oooo, so Americain!” Alicia.

  SxZ: “Mary has a Roman lover. A soldier. They can’t marry. So she feigns being raped. Gets this old geezer to front as her husband. Then knocks him off. Got it?”

  CxZ: “How do we get out of this Conundrum?”

  MxZ: “For sure, tell me, I want back into The Embrace.”

  “The Embrace,” Dalores, “that describes it okay, at least one way. The kid—sounds like a goat, Naaaayhhh!—whatever this presence is: being cellular male and female for a while—I thought of that in the beginning of my term, that it was male and female, so I was male and female. Right now. In my temporal existence. Somehow I got to think Frank shares in that. Can, anyways.

  Okay, we embrace. We see behind the other. We know either we’re alone or that we are not alone. Eve saw the Snake—however we want to interpret that. So there was something else. In her embrace of Adam she saw the Tree of Life—saw Good and Evil. Do we presume he saw it, too?”

  “Men have to be the Innocents,” sighs Sally, “They’re just too simple. Flash my boobs. Flip my skirt—and they’re happy. Instant oatmeal!” All laugh—break down into avalanches of laughing: skidding down the mountain, freaked-out, crashing and kabooms...just dribbling streamlets of good old fart cracking laughter.

  “You were there. Weren’t you?”

  “I accept that.”

  “I don’t.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Flesh.”

  “You’ve all been flesh. We’ve all been.”

  Flashing colors: hues, strobes, waves crashing.

  “Otherwise you wouldn’t be in the Conundrum.”

  “When we die?”

  “Mustn’t it be a birthing somewhere else?”

  “Sounds hopeful. But maybe life’s too evil to go on. We do such terrible things. One to the other.” He rolls towards her, finger-taps her belly, “With this one I had to ask—if it knew, knew about what it might do—the evil, I mean—would it want to be born? I’ve wanted to ask Ken and Tui that—but how could I? …Maybe you?”

  “Janet talked long and hard about birthing being what happens after knowing Good and Evil—she’s decided not to have kids.”

  “Right, they’ve finally made her a Nun, anyways!”

  “Shush!” Dalores grimaces, “That’s cruel.”

  NxZ: “I remember. I remember all. From my first to my last. Everything.”

  “Bits and pieces.”

  “Nothing.”

  SxZ: “Fucked! Ain’t we all human—we’re fucked!”

  The locale is deserted. The Conundrum empty.

  AxZ needs this break; this dissipation into The Embrace.

  “I just finished this book, the Malleus. I have to tell you, I’m stunned. It makes things so clear. All of Biblical history. All of this Secular Tale of Woe—that death is a flicking of the Off switch. Hmm. At first, it seemed only to indict men, males, sum up the whole patriarchal Lie and Conspiracy…it’s a manual for the Inquisition...used by just about every judge in every court, royal or clerical—burning witches…some warlocks...but it’s...it’s...look, D, maybe I’m going nuts, maybe it’s just me burning out, the academic wrangling come home to roost, I don’t know, but every time I read something I keep hearing myself saying “Believing is Seeing”...then the snide, mocking laughter of the echo, “Seeing is Believing.” I’m really zoned on this. But this Malleus, if I’m reading it as I see it—it’s a clear documentation of all the worst we can possibly imagine about the Biblical Imagination, about the interpretation of Genesis and all that. Plum out crazy brutalization and annihilation of the feminine...but then, if “Believing is Seeing” then I don’t just see that, I see the hidden storyline, The Lie—what the Malleus is as Trick.”

  Upon his call they are assembled. “You are selected because The Father has elected you.” Each and all are heartily stirred and warmed by Frak’s words. Frak before them in robes resplendent: flowing, bilious brilliance, gold-threaded with a large square silver medallion set across his breast...a true breastplate but one of such lightness that Frak moves with ease—it is this subtlety of motion, this fluidity of speech, this overall majestic and magical presence of his words which all at once confirm in each of them that he is truly High Priest...that they are Chosen, as he says, “Chosen Sons of The Almighty Father.”

  Into the sacred hut, the Holy of Holies, each one enters—there met by a scent so powerful that with one sniff they are intoxicated...precious frankincense which he brought back with him...this scent and the blistering bewilderment of the shower of fire, hundreds of candles snapping at the eyes...hooking and luring them in—them onto their knees and disrobed by unseen hands, stripped naked and splashed, crashed upon, inundated with water...water and sound: a voice unknown with a timbre that stakes the heart...as it is staked to the ground each is—there in a moment of mystified bewilderment and profound inexplicable joy...a joying of fear and hope and expectation—being propped upon their knees and swatted with a bone-cracking thump of a sacred rod...a power rod—a fierce warrior’s weapon, thence raised and clothed in a simple clean robe, just a sheet, undyed, rough of fiber: the humbling of obedience…rising, now a priest: God’s Warrior—having been submitted and submitting.

  “Flesh never dies. At least not with the family. Our children, this child, is past but also future. We will be his or her past.”

  “In truth we pass on all the Evil, all the possible Evil which can be.”

  Dalores bites her lip and rubs the back of her neck.

  “Evil and Innocence.” He gently rubs her kicking belly.