by John Okas
What frightens Sarah most is that the sitter, so out of line of late, might actually go over the hill and leave just when she needs her most. The last thing Sarah wants is the responsibility of overseeing the adolescence of a girl, not only taller, but who is in many ways mentally and emotionally more mature than she.
“Unlike me,” Sarah says, “Miss Lord is consistent, true to her word. All things considered, even though she condemns me, she’s the best influence I could have on you, Gloria. You see, a mother and daughter should be further apart in age—”
“Thanks for your confidence in me, Mummy,” Gloria says sarcastically. “I happen to be a very strong person, not some formless pap waiting to be molded by old stick-in-the-mud Lawdy.”
“Of course you’re a strong person, dear. I didn’t mean it like that. Only that one needs others to lean on.”
“Well, not me, Mummy.”
Sarah murmurs some encouragement to herself, then says to Gloria, “I can send you to boarding school or you can stay here with Miss Lord. Which will it be?”
Gloria will take the sitter.
“I haven’t discussed my plan with her yet. I would appreciate it if you would let me bring it up when I think the time is right.”
“Are you making Lawdy my legal guardian?”
“No, she’ll still be your baby-sitter, but you do what she says anyway, no arguments.”
Gloria, wise enough to know there’s no point in arguing with a fruit, agrees to keep her mouth shut. She goes to her tent and sets to thinking how she can make the most out it.
Good riddance, Mummy. After all, what girl’s dreams of paradise include her mother? Now to get rid of old die-hard Lawdy. She doesn’t have what it takes to run the whole show either. Maybe I can get her to crack. Or—she thinks about her uncles Early and Bones—maybe I can get her to come unglued and have some fun for a change.
Bodies Worlds Apart
Meanwhile, the black widow spins a design to help Laudette understand the metaphysical and military implications of Harry’s passing before she breaks the news of her own imminent departure. She decides that the benefits outweigh the risks in having Madam Keinar over to act as her mouthpiece.
To Laudette’s dismay, on the Friday before the first anniversary of Harry’s passing, when she comes down to supper, there is the medium, sitting at the table, drinking from a tall glass of beer.
“I hope someone doesn’t expect me to break bread with this bogeywoman!” says Laudette.
“Please!” says Sarah. “At least listen! You can eat while she talks.”
Laudette’s stout frame needs sustenance and plenty of it. The smell of food, Chef Shepp’s creamy potato soup, a potage she’s especially fond of, pulls her down. “All right, all right. I guess I’m trapped into listening,” she says as she takes a piece of pumpernickel, butters it on both sides, and digs into her bowl.
The medium blinks owlishly, waiting for the food to settle Laudette down, before she begins. She broaches the subject of Harry’s demise by talking about the types of bodies that are around and what she knows about them. “In the beginning, Sister Laudette, the Light, the Power of Creation, was fused with Its own desires. What It was and what It wasn’t were one body, not many. There was no time, no space, no matter, no energy, no love, no differences, no one for the One God to play God with. Single and neuter is boring. God may not care much for dice, but does love a good game of hide and seek. Love—when God loved, everything else come into the picture. Love needs an object, you see, and will make one if it has to. With a big bang, the One God split in two, and then into many. No sooner did an idea come to the Double Being’s mind than a fresh body came to pass. Conceived of and produced in the same instant, these first born had divine creative powers. They could travel at the speed of light and sense the full spectrum of electromagnetism from low frequency radio waves to cosmic radiation. Some, to feel their separateness, imagined distance between themselves and thus created vast space. Others, wanting to be grounded, settled into decreased frequency and formed dense matter, worlds. Thus came to be a multi- dimensional field with innumerable solid places for the inexhaustible heavenly host to hide. And so it is—plurality. The Light of this world is this world, the minerals, the vegetables, and the animals, including us. In its thickened state, the Light is engrossed. It has lost sight of Itself much the way you lose yourself in a book or a movie. As time marched on, the Root came to know the earth only, and memories of our being our own Author faded entirely. The fact is, Sister Laudette, this life is a dream, or, if you will, a game or a puzzle, God hiding and seeking God for a good time. We forget so we can have the pleasure of discovering our origins. When we awake we help God find the Light again.”
“How interesting,” Laudette says dryly, pinching her fat forearm. “But what in darnation does this have to do with those of us who feel we are awake?”
“Physical things exist across a wider spectrum than you can see and feel, Sister. Consciousness means trust in the imagination, responsibility to things you cannot see clearly. Sometimes the most obvious things are the least visible. God is lost within us, and we, thick and uncertain, easily succumb to the illusion that our bodies end where our skin does. You’ve been to meetings. You know how we tap into those routes hidden in the waves above and beneath our eyes and our fingertips. Our desires, the divine urges that landed us here, still have the power they had in the beginning. They are the Light, the creators of new life. You can’t literally fill your stomach with the word ‘bread’, or quench your thirst with the word ‘water’ but, loaded with your heart’s desire, your thoughts go back to the Author and generate their own responses. Answers to your prayers come in round-about ways. The One who conceived us supplied us with all the key elements to solve the mystery, and then promptly forgot them, leaving it up to us to get to the bottom of our existence and find the missing source there.”
Laudette’s mind turns on its own set of basics. She looks into her bowl and recollects, as if it were yesterday, the summer afternoons at the lake in Confidence Park when the Reverend Jackson would preach at the Sunday Ducking of the faithful. “The body with its appetites is a dirty one,” he would say, “like a mucky tramp all over your nice clean souls. The very presence of it on earth is a sure sign of sin. The water of this world has no power except that it stands for the water of the next, and the ‘Word’ is the gospel that you must take to heart in order to give that ordinary water the power to scrub your soul free of original sin.”
She looks up from her soup and says, “Nuts to you and your mumbo jumbo, Keinar. From what I remember, a cold shower could do that monkey a world of good.” Laudette snorts; and then adds quickly, for Gloria’s sake, “Not that this devil you worship really exists, mind you, except that those who believe in him make him so.” Then she leans forward, closer to Keinar, and says with a hoarse hush in her voice, “Now shush! I’m not going to listen to any argument that lets someone think she had the right to witch away Sir Harry. Someone should be on her knees making an act of contrition, testifying in front of the whole world including Baby here that this swami of yours is more on the dark and dirty side than the light.”
“Please try to understand, Sister Laudette,” Keinar goes on earnestly. “Brother Harry spent a life seeking ordinary satisfaction on the limited plane he knew. His only interest was the indulging of his appetites. And yet, through Lord Bharavi’s grace, he was blessed, and in the end, he became conscious of the process of the illumination. He found the Light. It was in him and he was in It.”
“Oh really? And what about someone saying she wished him gone?”
“Correction, Sister Laudette, Sister Bharani-Sarah wished to die herself. But Brother Harry was chivalrous, and took his wife’s place in the combat, under Mother Goose’s command. In the end what happened was what was going to happen anyway, the right thing to happen at the right place and the right time.”
“And how do you know?”
“Why, Father Fife told
me.”
“Damn your imaginary friends! If these confounded monkeys said go jump off the Kingsborough Bridge, would you all do it?”
“If it were my destiny. But, come now, Sister Laudette, you know as well as we that the Apple of Our Eye is no figment of our imaginations.”
“I know no such thing.”
In the face of Laudette’s denial, Keinar turns to Gloria and says, “Sister Laudette well knows Lord Bharavi is as real as any of us at this table, that he is a man tapped into the Light.”
“Madam Keinar,” Gloria expresses her own honest disbelief, “I have to say this bit about Mummy having a lover from around the world sounds like pure poppycock.”
Keinar points to Laudette. “Ask your baby-sitter. Back in the beginning she saw the Holy Smoke in your mother’s bedroom before we turned him into a figure of speech. Come now, Sister Laudette, why won’t you tell young Sister Gloria?”
“Yeah, Lawdy,” Gloria jeers, “why don’t you admit it? It wouldn’t surprise me if you were a fruit at heart,”
Seeing the monster park his hot rod in Keinar’s ear and come talking a purple-blue streak through the medium’s mouth, left an indelible mark on Laudette. But she would rather lie than have to tell Gloria she is fully experienced in the reality of the Horny God. She will not give the devil any extra due.
“Never, amen! And that’s my last word on it.” Laudette snaps and frowns.
Laudette’s denial is hardly convincing. Gloria marks how the big woman shudders and shifts in her seat. Now that her Daddy-o is gone and there is no one to flatly poo-poo the Hairy Tuna with her, she is less certain that it is only a fish tale.
“Lord Bharavi has drunk from the wellspring of Light,” says Keinar. “He is one of the very few who have been to the source of existence, and returned to tell about it. As Bending End, he could have selfishly stayed in Bliss, but he returned to this wheel of birth and death as one of us to show us the way to Liberation.”
“Liberation? Is that what you call it?” Laudette, flustered, can’t manage to keep her vow of silence for long. “Didn’t you always say how stuck he was on someone, that he was practically someone’s ordained slave? If he’s a slave how could he be free?”
“Come, Sister, you know the answer to this. He has the power to come among us and give witness to the Light. He sees the world without judging it. Our Lord is dirty and clean, old and young, dark and light, monstrous and beautiful, free and slave, master and dunce. He has given his word to save us all and thus must be tangled-up himself in the web of this life’s passion, folly, pain, intrigue, and joy. The Hero with a Thousand Nicknames could be any of us. That is why we see Lord Z as God.”
“God doesn’t act like an animal half the time?”
Gloria notes the shift on Laudette’s part. It puzzles her the way the sitter attacks that which she denies exists.
“The only difference between Sister Laudette and the rest of us is that we don’t deny what we know,” says Keinar, smiling at Gloria. “Come now, Sister Laudette, you know. When faced with the Light everything is vanity. Like the sun, the Inner Light shines on lives lived long in letter-perfect obedience to the moral precepts as well as on lives dedicated to the six sensual enjoyments and attachments. Brother Harry came to enlightenment because he was purely himself, which is the best even the Holiest of Holy men can hope to be. Remember, virtue is but a mere educational formality in a spiritual pilgrim’s progress, a groundwork for the more advanced states of understanding. Morals are for the masses. To quote a Clear Way Sutra,
The raging beast, the stormy sea, are parts of me,
too noble for everyday eyes to see.
Food, wine, and sex are the blessings three
that wash away sin and ignorance.”
“And murder? Does your suture consider that a blessing too? Because if someone and this haziness were in it together, throwing off sparks that hit Sir Harry, I don’t call that an accident.”
“There was no murder, Sister Laudette. In reality there is no difference between the physical and the spiritual. Brother Harry attained a state where he no longer considered his bodily desires as any different from those which drive him to union with the Light. Freedom can be slavery, and vice-versa. Evil exists to those who see it, as a projection of their own fear. The Sage has transcended personal appetites as well as opposites. His will is one with his desires. Untainted by the struggle of good and evil, what he wants is not what he wants, but the needs of the whole. Therefore it is said, ‘By his consciousness and compassion rather than by his goodness does the Wise Man show us the way from suffering.’”
Laudette mops up the remains of her soup with her fifth slice of bread and breathes a pestered sigh that ends with a raspberry. Keinar, on her fourth beer, is unfazed by Laudette’s rudeness. She waits for Pearly to set a whole roast chicken at Laudette’s place before she continues. “Lord Bharavi teaches that we needn’t deprive any of our urges the fuel they need to burn. He keeps the embers of his passion smoldering, and stokes them gently, and will not let his appetites die until the last desire of the last being is quenched and all the fire in the world is out, consumed by the eternal flame. Only then will Z enter perfection. So you see it is his desire for Sister Bharani-Sarah, his bond and devotion to her, that is the source of his compassion. Love is wonderful, how it can spontaneously attract and bind bodies worlds apart together, and separate members of the same family. The Sage’s love keeps him in touch with the paradoxes that live inside every one of us.”
“Speak for yourself. There’s no doubt in my mind it was the wrong God you witches pray to that helped to put out Sir Harry’s lights!”
“If a man catches his death at a dunking does that make the whole religion wrong?” Keinar says, now trying reason.
Laudette is not one to throw the baby out with the bath. “Hell, when someone went to the Dipster and said, ‘Dip me in the name of the Lord’ the Reverend told all the possible side effects. He didn’t go rinsing people off in the dead of winter so they’d come down with pneumonia. But Sir Harry was no fruit or nut. Everybody knew he thought the whole thing was a lot of eyewash. Which it is,” she adds emphatically for Gloria’s sake.
“But didn’t Brother Harry give you the money for my first house call, and didn’t he always buy the beer?”
“He was just being gracious, humoring someone—”
“Perhaps, Sister, but you and I know what blessings he received from the Purple Sage. He was the Lord’s stand-in for physical bliss. Come now, you must know Brother Harry was one of us even though he swore he wasn’t a believer. And don’t deny it: you did see and hear something marvelous. Whether you say you are one of us or not, you are, once you’ve had the experience. Why, Sister Laudette, it was you who put us together, you who sustained us with your authority, and in the end it was you who disbanded us.”
So it was! How it makes the thirteenth wheel hot! “Damn you, Keinar.” The big sitter leans over her plate and says gruffly to the owl-faced medium, “So what if I did go to a few meetings and listen to some of the crap that went on. If you remember when it came to calling it ‘cheese’ I said ‘no thank you, please.’”
Then Laudette turns to Gloria and says, “Baby, it’s not the way you think. In the beginning I did give ear a few times to this craziness because someone was in such bad shape, I figured ‘anything to keep her alive’. Don’t get the wrong idea from it. Everything I’m saying is just hypodermical. I mean, ‘suppose we saw this devil’. Nosiree, praise the Almighty, under no circumstances did I see anything but some shadows on the wall, and what the beer did to me.”
Gloria can see Laudette protests too much. Either she really is as fruity as her mother or this being the women came to meet is not pure fantasy but something palapable. Again Gloria thinks that maybe there is more to fruit and nut meetings than meets the eye.
Noting Gloria’s interest, Keinar says, “You can’t be the same once you encounter something for which there is no logical biolog
ical explanation. Sister Laudette is one of us, as was your stepfather, and so are you, young Sister Gloria.”
“You leave Baby out of it. It’s against the law to go corrupting minors.”
Gloria has no plans to adopt her mother’s zeal and hunger for mystical experience. She finds beauty in simplicity. Temperamentally, she is like her sitter where ritual comes in. It is so much more pleasant being purified in water than flames. Mentally she leans toward her Daddy-o’s playboy philosophy, adapted, of course, to provide equal entertainment for girls. But perhaps, her stepfather did not consider the fruit and nut hocus-pocus as oddball in private. Gloria turns back to Keinar to hear what she has to say to Laudette with a newfound interest.
“Consciousness is contagious. Lord Bharavi touches everyone whose lives touch anyone he touches, Sister Laudette. No doubt there is a plan for the life of Sister Gloria, as there was for Brother Harry. He knew it. Do you think Sister Bharani-Sarah forced her husband to have relations with her?”
“No, it’s perfectly natural for men to take to sweet things like Sugar,” Laudette says. “And after all they were man and wife. They had a license for whatever it was they did.”
“But he did know it was dangerous, because she told him many times that she was a vessel from the Blessed Zone and not herself at those moments of intimate power, as was he. And he would deny that there was such a power. Saying the power isn’t so is what gives it its dark face.”
Keinar turns to Gloria. “Despite what Sister Laudette says about his being evil, Z Bharavi is on the light side, and the free world owes him a debt of gratitude for using his lightning body along cryptic battle lines to counterattack Rudolph and his wizards of extrasensory slime. In fruited plane chronicles Brother Harry is a war hero. His sacrifice saved Our Lord. And while the Freeway lost many men and ships, because of Brother Harry’s love, his embrace of the Light, the Allies won a major victory on the psychic warfare front.” Keinar leans forward, looks around the table and smiles, obviously pleased to be able to break the good news. “You’ll be glad to hear that the war is over.”