And ah yes, he suddenly remembered why he had decided to blow off the rest of the day in the first place. It was the Tennyson quotation inscribed above the History statue in the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress. It read:
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event
To which the whole Creation moves.
Diablo scarcely had time to puzzle over the spatio-temporal contradiction internal to this phrase when a cascade of recollections dawned upon him like yesterday’s sunrise.
“Whoa,” he chuckled, squinting into the tardy morning of his memory as he sighted Billy Pronto ambling yet again up ahead. “That’s fucking nuts.”
The First Knot: A Gentle Breeze
“WHOA NOW!” was all Clovis had said, stabbing his broadsword into the soft earth in front of him, halfway to its hilt. For whatever unknown reason, this imperative had been sufficient to dissuade the boar stampede from any further onslaught. Now, however, Clovis found that his sword was cemented into the ground; he couldn’t even rock it to loosen it. He may as well have been trying to uproot the king oak itself—which, come to notice, was suddenly nowhere to be seen.
Jolted by the discontinuity, Clovis looked wildly around and found himself in an utterly unfamiliar forest. Not only did it bear little resemblance to the majestic giant oak cathedrals in which he had so comfortably lost himself, it looked like no forest he’d ever seen. The trees were small and crowded, the earth itself felt shallow, and thorns, vines, and underbrush made for a snarling tangle of jungle. At least Attila was still in his company, although she was more agitated by the abrupt claustrophobia of her surroundings than she’d been by the stampede of wild boars.
“Whoa, Attila, whoa now,” Clovis calmed his companion, and then, on whim, tried again to unsheathe his sword from the grasp of the earth. As it turned out, it now slid effortlessly from its position, as if from water, with not a grain of dirt offering the faintest friction of resistance. Thereby, Clovis irked his shoulder and threw himself off balance by offering far too forceful a yank, but before he had time to examine any connection between his utterance of “whoa now” and the release of his sword, an emphatic music captured the air around him:
trippety flips,
o fabulo mickey,
dracula dickey
jeskers a lee.
sluckery yuck
ta wimble zoo doo.
quabbery pips
gimbles le bloo.
kottle-ree-voctye-dee-mastle-nee-jee.
wee wee-he,
go go-she,
ta baxery bee.
Though he could make no meaning out of these words, it was a song that had led him to the king oak in the first place, and so there seemed to be an obvious path forward. No sooner had the song begun than Clovis promptly began navigating a path through the bramble in the direction of the music. It was only about twenty feet or so before he found himself on a trodden trail, though his commotion was apparently insufficient to capture the attention of a peculiar man costumed in the foliage of the forest, standing perfectly still a few feet down the way.
“Excuse me,” Clovis interrupted, sheathing his sword so as not to threaten. But the man appeared not to have heard him. “Pardon the interruption,” Clovis attempted once again, but was himself cut off by a burst of wild-seasoned laughter, startling them both, and to which the stranger immediately responded by following it toward a creek up ahead.
“Ho there, stranger,” Clovis hailed another greeting as he hurriedly followed. “It appears perhaps as though we are on the same quest.” Again, he received no response whatsoever. He might have assumed him deaf if the stranger hadn’t so obviously responded to the laughter. Clovis was about to loudly declare his presence once again when his attention was distracted by a jangling tug on his chain mail skirt. Looking down, he was relieved to see one of the gnomes grinning up at him. “Hurry, sire,” the gnome said pointedly. “Your sword.”
“Huh?” Clovis responded.
“Your sword.” The gnome gestured. “Whoa now.”
“What?”
“Here.” Two more gnomes appeared and led his hand to the hilt of his sword and began tugging on his arm. “Draw your sword and declare whoa now like you did before.”
“Why? What is happening? Why cannot he hear us?”
“No time for chatter, sire,” the first gnome answered, gesturing all around. “Time passes quickly in this place. Draw your sword.”
Having no other ready course of action, and also because he was feeling obligated to live up to whatever expectations had been thrown upon him with this sire and suit of armor business, Clovis halfheartedly drew his sword and looked at the three of them now jumping up and down and patting on their heads and bellies with excitement. “What happens next?” he asked.
“You will see, you will see.” They jumped up and down. “Hurry hurry!”
Resigning himself to the perpetual bewilderment of his recent life, Clovis sighed and planted his sword lightly into the earth. “Whoa now?” he asked.
Whoa now, indeed. The din of the forest, the clatter of the creek, the faraway hum of he knew not what, all of it went suddenly silent, only to be replaced after a few seconds by the jubilant woohoos of scores of gnomes racing out from every which way. Wandering around, Clovis began to notice something stranger than the abrupt silence that had preceded the gnomes’ newfound delight. The man dressed in forest foliage, crouched by the bank of the creek, was absolutely motionless, still gazing out at the water. Unnerved, Clovis walked over to him and tapped him firmly on the shoulder. The stranger remained as still as a statue.
“Yes, yes, good idea,” chimed a gnome, who snapped a bumblebee out of nothing and into his fingertips. “Get his attention, yes.” Delicately hanging the bee in midair, about two feet from the motionless man, he snapped a few more times, each time increasing its size. Then he blew on it. “To overcome the inertia,” he explained.
Though he understood none of it, Clovis nodded, and followed the man’s gaze toward the water. There he spied for the first time a maiden, her motionless derriere breaking the surface of the water, and her nakedness might have alarmed him if the creek in which she was swimming were not completely frozen as well—but not frozen, exactly. Clovis could see drops of water gleaming midspin toward splashdown, and ripples and waves just holding their peaks. What was happening here? The initial silence he’d experienced was apparently the consequence of everything—excepting himself and the gnomes—having fallen into an absolute dead standstill. No rustling of leaves, no insects revving about, no water babbling on. Everything was perfectly stationary.
“What is all of this?” Clovis demanded aloud, turning to face the bee-conjuring gnome.
“Sans tiempo,” the gnome replied, gesturing broadly. “You dropped anchor.”
“What?”
“You’re King of the Wood, guardian of the underworld.” He pointed to the sword planted firmly in the ground. “Only you can lead us into this realm.”
“What realm is this?”
“The human realm. Do you not recognize your own kind?”
Clovis looked again at the motionless man, and at his curious costume of forest foliage, blending into the cramped forest around him. “Then why cannot he hear me? And why is none of this familiar?”
The gnome waved him off. “They hardly ever hear us, especially at this late date. And that’s probably why this feels unfamiliar. You’ve been gone awhile.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you really heard nothing about the land of faerie?”
“Of course I know about faerie,” Clovis responded, indignant.
“Well?” The gnome spread his palms wide. “Do I need to spell it out for you?”
Despite his lowly heritage, and thanks to a cleric who had taught him the fundamentals of written language, Clovis as a matter of fact did know how to spell not only faerie but a host of other words as well. Not comprehending the gnome’s
anachronism, he protested as much. “I know how to spell faerie,” he protested. “F-A-E-R-I-E.”
“No, no, no.” The gnome waved away the flurry of confusion. “In the land of faerie, sire, time follows its own trends. We do not march in a straight line as humans do. We are free to roam across the timescape. Surely you have heard about this.”
“Can it be true?” Clovis asked aghast. “A sleep that lasts a thousand years?”
“Indeed it is.” the gnome nodded. “But so long as you’re King of the Wood, you’ll dream a thousand more.”
55 IN THE DRESSING ROOM at Red’s Cabaret, Diana pretended to adjust the impractical slit running all the way up her batik peasant skirt as Elizabeth removed her bikini top. “Life is not about learning lessons,” Elizabeth announced grandly. “Karma admits its own ignorance. There’s no explanation there whatsoever. It just postpones any explanation to some other lifetime of which I remember nothing and for which I can’t possibly be held responsible.”
Diana glanced toward her, abashed, as usual, by the reckless rotundity of Elizabeth’s breasts. Diana loved Elizabeth. Though they occasionally explored a sexuality with one another, ultimately they lusted after male varieties, albeit in abhorrence of masculine depravity. Theirs was a friendship foremost, and they recognized in each other an ally in defending their spirits from the ick of their occupation. In any event, thus distracted, and still very stoned on some sinsemilla sativa they’d shared an hour ago, Diana unintentionally disregarded Elizabeth’s assertions and inquired instead, “How old did you say you were when you could hold a pencil under your boobs?”
“Fourth grade,” Elizabeth answered, hefting her breasts in consideration. When she had first decided to dance down to a thong, it was only to make enough money to pay for a breast-reduction surgery, which she discovered are three times as expensive as breast augmentations. The first strip joints she explored left her feeling grossed out, as if she had just licked the floor of a gas station bathroom. Eventually, however, she found her way to the classier joints, the “gentleman’s clubs,” where she discovered that every dancer had to pay the management a stage fee of one hundred dollars a night just to get on the stage—their advertising expense for soliciting table dances, she learned. She figured it might take her a month or so to accumulate the money she needed. As it turned out, she made her money in under a week. After that initial success, she forgot about the surgery and instead laid down a three-year plan for financial independence: Find a sugar daddy tit man from tip row, the kind of mark that only comes during the daylight to avoid the crowds. Work exclusively for him, or give him that impression. Make a whack of cash and get out. She had a year left.
“But listen.” Elizabeth dropped her boobs and pursued her point. “Assuming that reincarnation doesn’t exist leads us to value our time much more. If this is it, with no do-overs, then injustice and laziness are inconceivable. Life is a digression from the divine.”
“A divine meandering,” Diana added, affixing lotus-flower pasties to her own nipples. In truth, she was not as attached to the doctrine of karmic reincarnation as Elizabeth imagined her to be—she had known far too many me-incarnated trustifarian hippiecrites who mistook the relaxation engendered by pot and their parents’ social class for enlightenment. Rather, she merely enjoyed their cannabis-enhanced chatter between sets. It insulated her soul from the depravity out front, and she knew it kept Elizabeth’s spirit kicking lethal roundhouses as well.
“A temporary tangent,” Elizabeth agreed happily, pulling on an oversized sweatshirt.
“A vivid dream,” Diana said, shaking her dreadlocks free of her hair tie.
“The fact is,” Elizabeth began, “the universe needs us. Without an observer, there is no universe.”
“Consciousness is half the equation.”
“We counterbalance the objectivity.”
“We make love possible.”
“And how.” Elizabeth nodded. “So, now you don’t believe in reincarnation?”
“Never did.” Diana took a heavy swig from her jug of water and headed toward the stage door. “I believe in free incarnation.”
56 THE YEAR THAT Elizabeth Wildhack could hold a pencil under her boobs was the same year that Brian Berlin tagged her with the nickname of Betty Boobs. Fourth grade, just two short years after she crashed her bicycle in the middle of an industrial cornfield.
As a young child, Elizabeth enjoyed racing her bicycle through the rows of a neighboring cornfield, grazing the skin of her bare arms and face as the sharp leaves whacked against her. It gave her a thrill, and she was oblivious to the dusting of agricultural chemicals it also gave her, many of which are known to mimic estrogen in the human body. Fortunately for her, she had only played this game a half-dozen times before she suffered a crash while trying to tear diagonally across several aisles of corn. The crash skinned both of her knees on the dry, dead, cemented soil, and Elizabeth took a solid blow to the chest when she landed on her handlebars. Badly shaken, she made her way home, stumbling and crying, and abandoning her bicycle to the corn. As the days passed, her raspberry kneecaps hardened into beef jerky scabs, which eventually dried up and fell away. The bruise across her chest faded too, but it left a swelling in its place. At first it was just her nipples that were swollen, but steadily the swelling increased until her breasts were ballooning into bloom, purpling her chest with stretch marks that took months to fade.
For years, Elizabeth attributed her precocious and cornucopian breasts to this injury. In this way, she was able to blame every atrocity of the social estrangement that developed apace with her chest on a moment’s clumsiness. And since Elizabeth’s nickname was Betty, it was ultimately inevitable that Brian Berlin, the most popular boy in class, would see the alliterative light one afternoon in fourth grade and loudly dub her Betty Boobs. Betty Boobs. A sobriquet destined to stick like a hive of bees. Every sullen morning as she dressed, she lamented crashing her bicycle in the cornfield, and was for a while unable to accept that there was nothing she could do to change that fact. But gradually, as her boobs grew irrevocably larger, Elizabeth came to realize that do-overs were not permitted in life. Not in a cornfield, not anywhere.
Armed with this early wisdom, Elizabeth made it her business to ensure that every titty-twisting grope she received from some Red Rover creep in gym class would be avenged. Not immediately, but eventually, covertly. No do-overs, she reminded herself again and again. Her imagination became occupied with orchestrating the misfortunes of her miscreants, subtly manipulating them into adversity. Lying to them about when an assignment was due or what pages to read, spreading disinformation about them on the bathroom walls, even sending homoerotic letters from one tormentor to another. Every grope, every bra snap, every crudity begat further chaos. When Brian Berlin wagged his tongue at her when they were learning about the Grand Tetons in geography, his tongue may as well have been the flapping wings of a Brazilian butterfly whipping up his own personal tornado. Her schemes were invariably successful, and as she watched the ramifications ricochet, Elizabeth gradually came to sense that the world was made of nothing but rumors and hearsay.
Once, during recess in fifth grade, Brian Berlin ran up behind her, barked, “Betty Boobs!,” and snapped her bra so hard that it unclasped. He sneered hideously as his friends hooted, repeatedly demonstrating the size of Elizabeth’s chest to one another as if they were juggling invisible basketballs. Sister Half-and-Half—so nicknamed for the black-tipped silver bangs that peeked from beneath her habit—reprimanded Brian, though not so severely since she always favored the most popular students. Brian apologized to Sister Half-and-Half, excusing his harassment by saying he was “just playing.” Sister Half-and-Half told him not to play so rough, and Brian nodded, and that was that. Elizabeth might have accepted his apology, even though it was directed to Sister Half-and-Half and not to her, but Brian sneered when he turned away, and as he walked past Elizabeth, into her ear he hissed the word “sssslut.”
This
succeeded in terrifying Elizabeth, taunting as it did the untamed adolescent sexuality that was then just beginning to course through her body. No one else heard his predation, and within moments any chance Elizabeth might have had of mustering a retort had passed. There was nothing for her to do but clench her teeth. Though it would be seven years before she paid that debt, there was never any doubt that the deed would be redeemed.
No do-overs.
57 ELIZABETH WILDHACK once read that Eskimos have some fifty-two different words for snow. Scholars have disputed the numerical veracity of this claim, but the point remains: Because snow is so important to Eskimo life, an exquisite vocabulary has developed to describe it. And so, Elizabeth was frequently led to marvel at the supreme importance of breasts to the modern male gaze. In her estimation, she was certain that there must be well over a thousand formal and informal synonyms for the female bosom. Is it possible, she wondered, that in the same way the Eskimo have developed an exhaustive vocabulary regarding the most fundamental aspect of their world, that men have developed their staggering lexicon of the breast for the same reason?
We will not be here pursuing a comprehensive catalog of this vernacular, although this is precisely what Elizabeth undertook. Here we will merely indulge in a brief sampling of her collected synonymy, if only to demonstrate the sheer breadth of metaphor intended to indicate the ineffability of the breast:
Nine Kinds of Naked Page 14