Daughter to Demons

by Jeffrey M. Mahr and Levanah

Chapter Twenty-Six:
I Love a Parade

Na jayate mriyate va kadacin
nayam bhutva bhavita va na bhuyah
ajo nityah sasvato ’yam purano
na hanyate hanyamane sarire.

The soul is never born, nor dies at any time.
Soul has not, does not, and will not come into being,
Soul is unborn, eternal, ever-existing and primeval.
Soul is not slain when the body is slain.
 ― Sri Krishna,
Bhagwat Gita: 2:20

 

As she walked into the living room, she saw that blue wasn’t exactly an accurate description, but the man’s skin was so translucent that she could see the bluish color of whatever circulated as blood in his veins through the surface, as if he were lit from within by an infinite ocean of light. He radiated peace and tranquility as he stood there gazing into the fireplace, as if he had all the time in the world, and Sal was nowhere to be seen.

“May I help you?” she said, and the man turned toward her, his face coming into focus as he calmly faced her. She rolled her eyes. ‘Damn! She had been married to him, sixteen thousand, one hundred and nine times married, to be precise — first when she was Radha — first Goddess and Shakti — when he was still a cowherd, then when she was Lakshmi in a multitude of bodies — and then again as Sita, when he was Rama. At least that time she hadn’t been quite so scattered.’ “Hello, dear,” she said. “What brings you out calling?”

“Yada yada hi dharmasya glanir bhavati bharata abhyutthanam adharmasya tadatmanam srjamy aham.”

“English, please. We have an audience.”

By this time, Frank had followed her into the living room and was standing right behind her, glowering with his arms crossed, the epitome of angry territorial male. “Yeah. You lost me right after ‘Yada yada,’ which I’m presuming didn’t lead into a sitcom joke, because nobody’s laughing.”

The strange man said, serenely enough, but with a hint of a sneer playing about his lips, “I said, more or less, that I’ve manifested in this age because your… wife has unwisely altered the cosmic order and caused a decline in the observance of religious duty.”

Frank went from territorial to threatening in the blink of an eye. “Look here, buddy, you may be hot stuff back in whatever podunk town you came from, but you’ll use a more civil tone in our home or you’re out in the street on your candy blue ass in a New York minute. Whatever my wife has done — or not done — is her damned business and none of yours.”

The blue man bristled and started to say, “I am charged with….”

…when Jackie interrupted. “Indeed. Frank is much more powerful than he looks, because he predates you by many ages of the world, and I of course am the source of all your power, so it would behoove you to be more polite. You appear to assume that I didn’t know what I was doing, and that you have any power to change my mind.”

“But this is madness!” the blue man cried indignantly. “You’ve destroyed the very foundations of human society!”

“Not ‘the foundation,’ but ‘a foundation,’ in my opinion, and mine is the one that counts,” she said casually, as offhand as if they were talking about the color of the drapes. “You’re perfectly welcome to kibbitz, but the hand is mine to play, because I’m the eldest of all, now that my mother is also my daughter, and I have the power, and thus the right to act as seems proper and fit to me. It’s complicated, I know, but the complaint line forms on the right, and the office is currently unstaffed. Perhaps I’ll set up a self-directed customer service hotline with many touchtone options available, but then again, as the Queen of Hell, that might be taken as a cruel joke.” She smiled, but it wasn’t a pretty smile at all, more like that of a tigress looking at a tethered calf.

“But you’ve subverted public order! In Afghanistan, a gang of lawless women have stoned their tribal rulers to death! Housewives in India are refusing to prepare home-cooked meals for their husbands! Women in China have murdered their husbands to make room for a girl child in the family!”

“And your point is what, exactly?” she asked pleasantly.

“But ten thousand years of World culture is simply fading away!”

“Ask me if I care,” she said, with one disdainful eyebrow raised. “Ask me if I care about the tribal elders, all male, all ignorant jerks with their collective heads shoved so far up their up their own asses that they could tell you what they were eating before they put it in their mouths and not much besides; or the salarymen who’ll now be eating at the vending machine or going out to lunch and supporting their local economies; or the husbands who tried to pressure their wives into killing their girl children so he could have a boy child to ‘carry on his name.’ Fuck’em if they can’t take a joke. Just fuck their sorry asses and the mangey horses they rode in on.”

“Uhm, Jackie,” Frank interrupted. “Who the Hell is this putz, and why was he calling you his wife?”

She spared him an angry glance. “He’s confused me with my mother, Frank, which is easy to do, since we’re essentially twins now, but even there he’s thousands of years behind the times. We’ve both moved on, my mother and I, while he represents a quaint notion of a tidy social order that was already antiquated when it was first promulgated five thousand years ago or more. You can think of him as a boy we once dated in high school, but he has nothing to do with our adult lives.”

“So when he called you his ‘wife’ he was… exaggerating?”

“As I said, Frank, it’s complicated, but no, we were never actually married. When I inherited all my mother’s memories after she died, on the other hand, I inherited her own memories of her marriage to him, and to Rama, another avatar of the same underlying God, and many others, including the archangel of Death, Samael. We have no special relationship, though, because I inherited memories of all her marriages and dalliances over the years, which is much more than I ever wanted to know about my mother.”

“So why’s he here then?”

“I imagine because he’s upset, although he likes to think of himself as being above petty emotions. In the end, though, he’s the guardian and defender of the status quo as he conceives it, and so becomes irritated — as you’ve just seen him — whenever something rocks his little toy boat. You probably know him as the guy those people who dance around the airport dressed in saffron-colored robes and singing are supposedly begging for.”

“The Hare Krishna people? He’s that guy?”

“The same. He goes by Rama too, as I said.”

“Damn! I was stuck in a layover at Buffalo Niagara International once while they were singing their little ditty, over and over and over again. I had the damned thing memorized after the fifteenth ugly chorus. It was worse than Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall sung by the entire first grade class at my old grammar school, and they didn’t even know how to sing a proper roundel, so they couldn’t achieve the interesting point and counterpoint one hears as a simple melody interweaves with itself. ‘Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare.’ What is that, three separate words? I thought I’d go mad with the cymbals and incense and the little off-key organ they were playing.”

“Excuse me!” The blue man was obviously upset. “Those are my devotees you’re talking about!”

“So?” Frank said rhetorically. “They were bad at it — the devotee business — making fools of themselves for the most part, handing out ten cent carnations to people and then demanding five dollars in return so they’d leave you alone. That’s not a religion; that’s a thinly-disguised ‘protection’ racket. I’m all for religious music, mind you; who can listen to a Gregorian Choir without feeling a little moved by the beauty that a bunch of men can create with their unaided voices, but those guys practice! They’ve had their music composed by talented musicians.” He thought for a moment, then added, “My favorite religious song, though, has got to be Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, although I like Jeff Buckley’s version of it better than Cohen himself. K.D. Lang does a really beautiful performance of it as well.” He glared at the blue man in a sort of irritated pity. “You really ought to pick up the CD, or download it from iTunes sometime. Maybe you could persuade your quondam ‘devotees’ to change their tune. I suppose the scam wouldn’t work as well if people actually wanted to listen to the racket they’re making, though.” He laughed, a short sharp sort of bitter laugh. “Having an actual audience would cut down on access to the people passing by as rapidly as possible, though, so I suppose it’s actually a brilliant bit of social engineering, not that I approve all that much of that sort of greedy discipline.”

“I didn’t come here to be insulted!” the blue man said huffily.

“Really?” Frank asked blandly. “Why bother coming at all then? Any fool could have predicted the chilly reception you’re presently enjoying. If you’d been polite and called ahead, perhaps we could have shown you the local sights, taken you out for lunch, perhaps even arranged a little trip up to Niagara Falls, if you were as intimate a friend to my wife as you’d claimed to be. But she assures me that you were not, and that your actual acquaintance, if any, was with her mother, who has loads of friends like that by all report, not that I have anything against her. She can be a little overwhelming at times, but she has a good heart, I think, and she’s always welcome here. You, on the other hand, have merely been tiresome, and it’s still very early in the morning, too early for polite people to come calling, so at the risk of seeming rude, if you have anything to say, please say it now and then leave.” He smiled without rancor, but also without any good humor at all.

“But I’m the Lord Krishna!” he expostulated, with eloquent gestures of his perfect hands.

“So?” Frank shrugged. “I seem to be the Lord Marduk the Wise, amongst other names and titles, according to my new memories, Tamer of the Primordial Dragon, Saviour of Babylon, and I have no reason to disbelieve them, since I appear to know lots more about ancient Mesopotamia than I used to know. It’s an odd feeling, but I have no doubt that I’ll cope. If you expect me to be impressed by you, though, you’ll be sadly disappointed. Gods and Goddesses are a dime a dozen around here, so you have to at least be able to sing a little song, or perhaps play the piano, if you’d like a round of polite applause.” He turned to Jackie and said, “Do you think we ought to have a piano, Sweetheart? I designed a music room off the north façade with plenty of floor space for at least a baby grand, and I think it would be fun to sit around of an evening playing and singing old songs together with the children, more fun than watching television, anyway.”

Jackie cooed with pleasure. “Oh! That’s a perfectly lovely idea, Frank. You’re lots more clever than I am about making formal plans, but I’m all for it. I’d wondered what that room was for….”

“Well, I’ve never enjoyed designing ‘entertainment’ rooms in which the only entertainment allowed for was a huge flat-screen video monitor, so I looked back to a slightly earlier era when I was drafting my plans.” He smiled at the memory of it. It had been a part of his Master’s Thesis, and had been very well received. “I got an ‘A-plus’ on it too. It turned out that the guy who took over as my faculty advisor after DeBauck went screwy was a fan of old architecture, and simply loved the fact that I’d remembered to provide the northern light, because it allows the owner to open the drapes for good even light without fading the piano, the sheet music, or the artwork on the walls. It turns out that those old architects knew a lot about eco-friendly design from the standpoint of people without access to any of the modern technological crutches: forced-air central heating, air-conditioning, and electric lights. Solariums, sun porches, and insulated cisterns for hot and cold water were just part of their architectural armamentarium. Add in modern insulation and you’ve got a five-star energy rating without hardly trying. Plus, there were such a lot of spare materials left over after the legal dust from DeBauck’s spiteful folly had settled that I was able to bid on them and cop a recycling award for my own project as well, which was some small measure of justice, and personally quite satisfying as well.” He smiled again, quite cheerful despite the early hour, their argument, and their uninvited guest.

“But what about my problem?” Krishna whined. He pointed toward Jackie with a nasty sneer on his face and said, “That bitch….”

Like a shot, Frank turned to the little blue man and casually punched him in the nose, knocking him to the floor, where he flopped like a rag doll, arms and legs all akimbo. “I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your mouth while you’re a guest in our home,” he said without any particular rancor, looking down at him as he lay sprawled on the carpet, some sort of blue ichor beginning to drip from his nose. “I’ll expect you to clean up after yourself if you bleed on our carpet as well, so you’d better conjure up a handkerchief if you can. There are tissues on the end table if you can’t.”

“Sorry,” he mumbled nasally, holding his hand to his nose as he turned over toward the table, fumbling for the box of tissues, “I was angry.”

“Well,” Frank said with some sympathy, “No hard feelings. My wife can be a little high-handed at times. It’s a habit she’s inherited from her mother, I think, not that I have anything against either of them for their sometime resentment of male authority figures. I shudder to think what life would have been like for me if I’d grown up female in what’s still largely a man’s world. I suspect that I’d be very angry most of the time, but then I’m not nearly as nice as she is either.” He leaned down to help the blue man up to his feet, which he accepted readily enough.

“Jackie?” Frank turned to his wife, who was just standing there watching this strange masculine dance of oneupmanship and a certain courtly protocol with what seemed like astonishment. “Do you have any idea what this fellow is complaining about?”

“Well,” Jackie said, feeling a bit guilty, like Lucille Ball in the old I Love Lucy television shows, “I may have had something to do with it, having caused a tiny little revolution in the nature of divinity, so a lot of guys like Krishna here may be slightly out of a job. On the bright side, though, stodgy old Semangelaf will probably be changing for the better, so my mother will be happy.”

“A revolution?” Frank asked mildly.

“We-e-e-el, Lilith had been ranting on about her ‘pathetic little thunder God’ and all his ilk, so I was already a little ticked off, and when the granddaddy of all thunder Gods barged into my atelier and killed my mother — in the process of trying his damnedest to kill me — and then all her memories of him swept through my discombobulated mind, I kind of went ballistic.

Frank raised on eyebrow and asked, “Which means…?”

“Well, you have to understand that he’d just blasted my mother into oblivion with one of his thunderbolts, and then raped my unconscious body, after letting his ‘homies’ have me first, so I was both outraged and very angry, so when I finally recovered enough strength to fight back, I sort of wiped them out, Zeus and his cronies all.”

Frank thought about that for a moment, then nodded. “Okay. So what? I’m glad you did, Jackie. If I’d been there, I would have helped you. You done good, as the saying goes.”

“But you don’t quite understand, Frank; I obliterated Zeus and his little gang of thugs using my most powerful current aspect — that of Succubus — by devouring their masculinity, both past and future, and he’s the original Proto-Indo-European dewos, from which come the entire concept of masculine deity, the very word, ‘devine,’ itself the Old Persion daiva, which we know now as demon, all the same word at heart, all based upon a masculine God of Light, from Proto-Indo-European dyeu, to shine, which includes my mother’s ‘pathetic volcano God,’ so it’s all unraveling, the whole tottering edifice of patriarchal religion. Ares is dead as well, the God of war, and Hephæstus, the God of artifice, of recklessly twisting and bashing and bending the Earth to suit human purposes. They’re all dead, sucked dry, their powers vested in me and in my various Avatars, so all their works are slowly fading, including Mister Blue-Blood here, the specifically Indus Valley version of the same tradition.” She turned toward the little blue man, “Sorry, Krishna-Rama, but you’re fading. I thought you’d looked a little pale, and I think you’re shrinking as well. So you’re probably headed back toward being a pastoral cowherd spirit, something like a faun, but a little more domesticated. Sic transit gloria mundi, eh? Take two aspirin and call us in the morning if you still feel a little under the weather.”

Krishna glared at her, but said nothing, squirming a little as he grew smaller, looking less like a man and more like a young boy every instant. It was difficult to be mad at him, because he was looking cuter by the second, not blue at all, but rather boyish and full of wonder, deeply tanned by a life spent in the fields.

Jackie thought for a moment and manifested a simple wooden flute, handing it to him and saying, “I think it’s time you ran along home now, isn’t it? Here’s a little present for you, but your mother will be missing you, won’t she?”

“Nah!” he scoffed. “I’m a big boy now. She lets me take care of our cattle all on my own.” He beamed with pride.

“Well, this little pipe will help you pass the time, and the cows will like it too, because they’ll know that you’re nearby, guarding them from harm.” She ruffled his hair and he grinned, evidently quite accustomed to women doting on him. “Now wait a moment, I have an old friend here to meet you.”

She turned toward the blazing fireplace and said, “Sal? Come on out, please, I have an old friend here to meet you.”

Sal rose up from the burning bed of coals and said, “Yezzz?”

She smiled and said, “Why don't you take on one of your other forms, Sri Garuda? Either Garuda or Hanuman, I think, would be nice.”

At that, Sal shifted through a bewildering variety of forms, eagle, ape, amalgams of both, or either, and winged angel, embodiment of elemental fire, finally leaping forth from the heart of the fire as a young Hanuman, Krishna's traditional friend and charioteer, holding out his hand to the young boy. “Hello, old friend. Do you need my help again?”

“Garuda!” he cried in real joy. “It's been ages since I've seen you! Have you been living here all this time?”

“Not all of it.” He smiled and clapped him on the back into a friendly hug. “Part of it I spent enslaved to an evil demon named Debauck, but our Lady Lakshmi here — the fountainhead and source of all true knowledge, science, and wisdom — rescued me from my prison and restored me to my former glory.”

Jackie smiled at them both and said, “Garuda, Sal, I mean to send Krishna back in time a good long way, and wanted to ask if you'd like to accompany him on his journey, as you have so many times before.” She winked at them both and said, “I'm sure there are many young cow maidens who'd love to meet you both.”

He brightened up noticeably at the thought. “Can I come back to visit, though? It's so peaceful and pleasant that I like it here.”

“Of course you can, Sweetie. We'll keep the home fires burning, just for you, but you'll have lots of new adventures to tell us about every time you return, and I'll expect you to introduce your wife, just as soon as you find her, and you will.” She nodded at him sagely, smiling that same mysterious smile that prophets often do.

He grinned and said, “I'll do it, then. Krishna and I were always good pals, but I think I'd like to skip all the wars he got us into.”

She patted both their heads, then hugged them to her bosom. “I don't think you'll have much trouble there. I've done my best to make it a little more peaceful back home.”

“Oh, good!” he said, and then Garuda/Hanuman grabbed Krishna around the neck in a mock wrestling move and they scuffled for a bit — still smiling — before they both turned and said in chorus, “See’ya, Lady!” With that, they vanished into time.

“Well,” she said, turning to Frank again, “that went well, all in all.”

Frank looked a little doubtful. “Uhm, Jackie, so am I included in the general wreck?”

“Oh, no, Frank! You’re from an entirely different tradition, long before the Indo-European God-King revolution, the Sacred Consort and Hero of the Mother Goddess, Her Eternal Lover and Tanist all in one. Tiamat was very careful to base you in a mythos with a little more staying power.”

“You make it sound as if she foresaw your encounter with Zeus, and your reaction to it, before it happened.”

Jackie blinked in surprise, then said, “Well, of course she did. What’s the point of being the Creatrix of the Universe without the ability to see what lies ahead and gently guide it back on course from time to time, or to change paths slightly in order to avoid catastrophe?”

“So you’re arguing for a sort of deism?”

“Not at all, more like a form of coöperative solipsism, since we’re all part of the reality we’re creating.”

“How can you create reality, Jackie? Doesn’t that seem like a contradiction in terms?”

“Not to me, since I’m looking at it from experience — the sum total of the inherited personal histories of the millions of women who’ve contributed their memories and decisions over time to mine. From that viewpoint, the strong anthropic principle applies, and we act collectively to create our own social and physical reality. Based on that treasury of feminine wisdom, the current situation seemed grossly suboptimal, so I decided to change it slightly, being slightly iconoclastic by nature.”

“I still don’t understand exactly what you mean, Jackie.”

“Well, you know how that German guy, Friedrich Nietzsche, said, ‘Gott ist tot’ ? — ‘God is dead,’ in ordinary discourse — What he meant by that was that we humans had coöpted God, forced Him to bend to our will, to satisfy our own petty desires for wealth and prestige, to excuse our selfishness and greed, to slake our collective lust for revenge, and to act out our personal hatreds on our behalf. In the process, we’d killed the real God that Nietzsche felt lay behind the cruel masks and martial costumes that we hung upon Him. The problem for Nietzsche was that the benevolent God that he imagined to be real was founded upon sand, because the ancient Gods that he was based upon were all those things and more, the childish imaginings of savages who believed that the perfect man was the perfect killer, the Superman who vanquished every foe, raped their women, and distributed the spoils of his many slaughters to a favored few. Well, that particular God deserved to die, but wouldn’t stay dead. No matter how many Gospels proclaimed a God of Love — the God that Nietzsche thought we’d killed — the old reptilian realities of his origin — our basest and most barbaric desires — kept bubbling up like fetid swamp gas from a mire.” She made a sour face, then said, “Since he refused to die by means of philosophic discourse, and neither public ennui nor secular hijacking seemed effective, I killed him more efficiently by going both backwards and forwards in time, as it were, and murdering him — or more precisely murdering the possibility of divinity in anything like the Western God — when he was either a little bitty boy or an old and doddering man. Since he’s been dead forever, he doesn’t have any believers to resurrect him in the present or the future, so I imagine that he’ll stay dead this time.”

Frank thought about this for a second. “So you changed our entire timeline?”

“Loosely speaking, yes. The technical details are rather complex, since the changes had necessarily to extend through an infinite multiplicity of parallel timelines — not to mention the issue of countable versus uncountable infinities and mirror-symmetric Calibi-Yau manifolds — but in layman’s terms, ‘entire’ is close enough.”

Frank’s jaw dropped slightly as his eyes widened in surprise. “Uhm… what you said .”

Jackie reached up to gently stroke his brow, saying, “The Muse Urania, mistress of the starry heavens, is one of my many avatars, and the Patroness of all things mathematical, among many other things. Since my recent apotheosis, I seem to be a bit more of a science and mathematics nerd than I ever was before.” She rolled her eyes for effect. “Who knew? I obviously harbor unplumbed depths.”

He arched one bushy brow at her and said, “Unplumbed depths? Is that a challenge?” The hint of lechery that played on his lips was not entirely unwelcome, but….

“I’m afraid not, dear heart,” she said as she caressed one of his thighs and smiled. “I have to drive in to work, since I’m receiving a new shipment of silks and custom prints for my Spring collection this morning. My staff will be there already, so I can’t just flit in like a butterfly. ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave…’ and so on.”

“Well, we’ll have to see about these depths sometime very soon then; I do love a challenge.”

“And I love meeting them. Duty calls, though. I have a payroll to meet, and quite a few more people than I’d ever imagined being part of my possible future depending on me.” She rolled her eyes in resignation. “Capitalism isn’t nearly as much fun as it’s cracked up to be.”

Later that night, Frank apologized for his anger from that morning. “I’m sorry, Sweetheart. A lot of things just swept over me at once. I guess I just hadn’t been thinking about parenthood, and then that Krishna kid burst in claiming to be your husband and I just lost it for a few moments.”

“It’s okay, dearest. I shouldn’t have sprung it on you like that, when you were still getting used to the baggage that comes with immortality. I have to apologize as well, since my decision to become pregnant was spur of the moment. I should have discussed it with you first.”

He thought about that only for an instant before he said, “No, that choice is never a man’s decision in any way. When a man has sexual congress with a woman, he’s partaking in a sort of sacrament the possible outcome of which is always a child, whether he realizes it or not. If he chooses to dance, he has to be prepared to pay the piper, not that it’s any sort of burden, at least for me. I wanted to have a child with you, but every prospective father is taking a chance on imponderable outcomes, the worst of which is no pregnancy at all, and the thought of pregnancy, that I might engender a child in you, lent a special excitement to our every joining. I suspect that most men feel the same. I knew a fellow in my degree program whose marriage almost foundered on their failure to conceive after almost three years of trying, so I know how perilous these waters are.”

Jackie felt a wave of compassion sweep over her. “Do you keep in touch with this man? I can fix that, you know.”

Frank blinked, surprised almost against his will. “I hadn’t thought of that. The last I heard, they were considering adopting a child, but you know how long that takes. Can you really?”

She gazed owlishly into his eyes. “Well, I’m sort of involved in all aspects of love, not just sex, you know.” She petted his shoulder, stroking the surface structure of his firm deltoid and triceps muscles, which were just as perfect as the rest of him.

He smiled, having some notion of her thoughts. “I’ll get in touch with him, and tell him about a project that I think he’d be interested in, or something like that. I suspect I can get him and his wife over for dinner, and you can work your magic on them both. No matter what they’ve been told by doctors, miracles happen, and I’m sure you can use the opportunity to spice up their marriage as well, which they both surely deserve after so much heartache and struggle.”

Jackie’s heart almost burst with pride and love for the generous man who’d accepted, even embraced, her strange history. He continued to astonish her with a kind of masculine compassion and sportsmanship that seemed completely natural, the natural product on an innate sense of personal integrity and honor that she hadn’t noticed in many men. He was a little like Semangelaf, she supposed, but not stogy at all, and she really liked the way he laughed, open and honestly unfraid. “You do that, dear, and in the meanwhile, we can work on your own aspects and powers, since you could probably do the job of your own if the underlying fault lies in your friend.”

He blinked again in surprise. “What do you mean?”

“Well, your sphere of influence includes magic, air, earth, and fertility, the first three at least very useful to an engineer, and the last a handy bonus.” She arched one brow at him, saying, “You must be very careful not to let any woman sit on your lap, you know, until you have your powers under control. As it is, you could knock up a hundred virgins without twitching a muscle or laying a finger on them. I don’t doubt that you had something to do with my ‘spontaneous’ need to have a child by you…. Besides the obvious, of course.” She waggled her brows slightly, focusing his attention on her eyes.

He looked directly into the eyes in question, thus encouraging her belief in her own seductive powers, and said, “Well, I’d like to think that I had something to do with your decision, but I think love does that to people as well. Making babies is one of those portions of the human repertoire that seems innate.”

“Did you know that semen is addictive to women?”

He blinked at the non-sequitur. “You’re joking, right?”

“Not at all. The majority of the components of semen aren’t spermatazoa at all, but rather a witches brew of potent mood-elevating compounds: endorphins, estrone, prolactin, oxytocin, and serotonin, plus two very specific ‘female’ hormones — follicle-stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone. The first spurs egg maturation in the ovary. The second is involved in triggering ovulation. There’s also a bit of thyrotropin-releasing hormone, which probably helps to ensure a successful start to a pregnancy for women with hypothyroidism. All the rest is there to make us very happy.”

Frank looked a little uncomfortable. “Unh… isn’t this some sort of trade secret or something? I feel like someone just passed me the secret plans to the Martian Spy Ray or something. It makes me….”

Jackie smiled brightly, then said, “… a human being, Frank, other than the immortality thing. The fact is that people are designed for each other, and have reached accommodations with one another for so many millions of years that we fit together so nicely that — when everything goes right — it feels like old shoes feel good when you put them on.”

“Unh….”

“Don’t you see, Frank? Women who regularly have ‘unprotected’ sex with men are very unlikely to be depressed, even if they’re slightly worried about an ‘unplanned’ pregnancy. They’re also far less likely to attempt suicide or indulge in other self-destructive activities. In other words, men are designed to be almost irresistible to women, and to make them happy. That’s why we’ve put up with you all these millions of years, despite your many faults.” She grinned to indicate that the last remark, at least, really was a joke. “But it works the other way around as well. We’re designed to please men,” here she caressed his hip, moving suggestively toward his groin, “…in oh, so many ways. Just as men need women, women need men — mostly, but even the exceptions fit into a larger social scheme that makes ‘maiden aunts’ and bachelor uncles available as family suppport groups, artists, free spirits, and all the rest of the people it takes to create a thriving culture.”

“Well, it certainly explains why the ‘rhythm’ method of birth control fails so often,” he observed dryly.

“Exactly. I don’t know exactly when women discovered that they were unlikely to become pregnant away from the middle of their cycles, but it must have been a very long time ago, because men have managed to evolve a biologic strategy to circumvent that particular strategy by triggering ovulation during the sexual act itself.”

“I’ll be damned. So using condoms makes one miserable in the long run, and doing without….”

“Don’t get too smug, Mister. Do you want to know how they discovered this fascinating fact?”

“Of course, in the spirit of scientific enquiry of course.”

“It’s even better than your story about the seagulls. You know how women are supposed to synchronize their menstrual periods when they live in close proximity?”

“I’d heard of it, it’s supposed to be some sort of female pheromone or something.”

“Close, but no cigar. It’s nothing to do with the women at all, at least not directly, because — oddly enough — menstrual synchrony is completely absent in groups of lesbians.”

“So what is it, then?”

“It’s the sperm. In any large group of women who aren’t lesbians, it’s almost certain that at least some of them are having unprotected sex with men because — as we now know — unprotected sex with potent men is addictive. It turns out that the mere smell of sperm is influential enough to trigger ovulation and general horniness in heterosexual women, but not in the vast majority of lesbians, even when the odor is so faint that the women themselves can’t detect it, so one woman having sex with men makes most other women horny, so they have sex, hopefully — from the man’s point of view — expose themselves to sperm, and the entrainment of their sexual encounters entrains their menstrual cycles almost through accident, at least until one or more of them fall pregnant.”

“Not just the men, surely,” Frank objected. “If, as you say, unprotected sex makes women feel better about themselves, and unprotected sex makes babies more likely, the species as a whole is enormously advantaged over the sort of species in which celibacy paid dividends. If men have evolved addictive sperm, women have likewise evolved vaginal tissues and nasal linings exquisitely sensitive to the substances contained in that sperm, so might fairly be described as programmed for addiction. It seems to me that there’s a mutual accommodation there, no more surprising — all in all — than the fact that women prefer men who pay attention to their pleasure as well as their own, but far more certain, since it requires no actual effort, even from insensitive clods.”

“Maybe. It seems reasonable anyway, but it also

suggests that the most effective cologne for men might be a little jizz behind the ear.” She laughed at the image, remembering a certain film.

Frank remembered it too, but said, “Might make applying it more interesting than shaking a bottle of Old Spice as well.” He smiled, and at that they both laughed.

An hour or so later, Frank added, “Apropos of nothing in particular, I’m sorry too about poking that kid. He made me mad when he uttered a scurrilous and offensive remark about you, and I just hit him out of angry reflex.”

She patted his trim behind with a certain sense of casual possession. “Not to worry, dearest. He’s good as new now, and you have my permission to defend me or my honor any time you like. He was out of line, and well he knew it, no matter how outraged he was by my ‘highhanded’ actions.” She gave him a little look to remind him of his own remark. “The fact of those actions ought to have given him all the clues he needed to guess that the lay of the land had changed while his attention lay elsewhere.”

“I was surprised, though, by how little force it took to bloody his nose for him. I just took a little poke at him to teach him a little respect for his betters, but all of a sudden he was flat on the floor. Last time I was in any sort of physical altercation, there was a lot more flailing and much less blood.”

“But the situation has changed since then, Sweetie. You can’t begin to compare yourself to what you were before your transubstantiation, because deathless ichor flows through your veins now, not blood as such, and you were thereby made immortal, just like me, but without the accompanying loss of physicality. I’m not exactly sure, but I think you could’ve ‘whipped’ even Zeus right now, and without special training or practice.”

“Really? What makes you say that? I feel healthier, but haven’t noticed any superpowers. I can’t crawl up walls, for example, or run so fast that I’m just a blur to passers-by, so I’m pretty sure that I’m neither Spiderman or the Flash.”

“Are you sure?”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you actually tried to do either of those things?”

“Well, no, but it stands to reason ….”

“Reason has little to do with it, Sweetheart. It’s a matter of faith and inner certainty. Taking on an Aspect or Avatar is an affirmation of one’s essential self and purpose, not a random ‘power’ from a grab bag of comic book ‘tricks.’ ” She looked carefully at him, her eyes becoming slightly unfocused as she concentrated on other planes of existence. “I think that Tiamat chose very carefully, since as Marduk you were the builder of Eridu, one of the many ‘first’ cities in the world, although of course I… or rather Tiamat, had countless Avatars to choose from, having been present at the Beginning, and a part of everything since. Since her primary Aspect is water, you might say that she embodies all of life, or at least cellular life.”

“Do you think they knew each other?”

Jackie blushed, since she remembered their ‘knowledge’ of each other intimately, “Yes, they were married — so to speak — for quite some time, but it was troubled — as were so many God and Goddess relationships in antiquity — and they became enemies for a time, sort of like a very bad divorce, at least for public propaganda. If in fact she chose that ‘essence’ of immortality for you, the public reports of their enmity were obviously either exaggerated or more temporary than reported.”

“What exactly was reported?”

“Well, they supposedly fought an epic battle in which Tiamat was killed, but reports of her death seem to have been exaggerated. It’s difficult to kill a Goddess, since her believers will have resurrected her in any case.”

“So, no hard feelings, then?”

“No, no,” she said, “they do but jest, murder in jest, poison in jest; no offence i’ the world.”

“Why do I have the impression you’ve misquoted that speech? Hamlet, isn’t it?”

“True, I took liberties.”

“Don’t you always?”

In answer, she only smiled.

The interior of St. Hildegard’s Church held the faint odor of aged wood and incense; it was dark, despite the fractured light filtered through the rows of tall stained glass windows on either side of the nave, the large rose window depicting the meeting of Jeanne d’Arc and Our Lady, Queen of All the Angels, at Orléans over the choir and organ loft toward the rear, and the tripartite colored representation of the Our Lady in her Aspect of Abundance, twin Cornucopias flanking Her Presence like the horns of the Moon at the front of the chancel, spilling out Her Blessings on the gathered crowd.

Although there was electric lighting, it had been installed in the Thirties, so by modern standards was on the quaint side of barely adequate. The church itself was built in the middle of the Roaring Twenties, and presented from the outside a curious melange of Medieval and Art Deco in red brick.

Standing at the pulpit to the left of the altar, three women in sacerdotal vestments were speaking in chorus with considerable conviction, “And so my children, I leave you this day with a quote from Iphigenia: ‘Listen to the words of our Great Mother Isis, Queen of Heaven; She who of old was also called among us Artemis, Astarte, Athene, Arianrhod, Aphrodite, Bride, Bronwen, Ceres, Cerridwen, Danu, Dana, Demeter, and by countless other names: Let My worship be within the heart that rejoices, for all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals. Therefore, let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you.’ ” With a final benediction, they closed the service with all due pageantry as their parishioners quietly began to gather together their belongings, replace hymnals either in the racks built into the pews or into their purses or into carrying cases for those with personalized copies, which quite a few did, especially the elders, many of whom preferred the large type edition.

Hanging back a little from the general exodus, Jackie and Frank wandered over to the Shrine of the Son in the transept — the necessary complement to the Shrine of the Daughter opposite. — Frank lit a candle and then folded a bill small enough to insert into the Bounty Box placed discreetly off to one side, then reached out to take her hand. “It’s little enough,” he said, “for all we’ve been given.”

Jackie, heavily pregnant by now, murmured, “Doesn’t it feel a little self-referential, offering devotion to yourself?”

“Not really,” he said. “You yourself explained that we are part and parcel of a solipsistic Ouroboros, both creators of and participants in the world we’ve made for ourselves. In honoring my avatar I dedicate myself to being the best man that I can be, the man I dreamt of becoming when I was just a boy. All such dreams are self-reverential, you know, a younger self creating the future self he means to become, fully-engaged in a continuous process of becoming, powered by his own dreams.”

“Why, Frank, you’ve turned into a poet!” Jackie said softly as she pressed her cheek against his chest, listening to and hearing the deep and everlasting rhythm of his beating heart.

 

 

No man knows what the wife of his bosom is —
no man knows what a ministering angel she is —
until he has gone with her
through the fiery trials of this world.
 ― Washington Irving,
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
(1819-1820)

 

The End of a Beginning

 

 

Copyright © 1998, 2002, 2005, 2007, 2009 by Jeffrey M. Mahr

Copyright © 2011, 2012 by Levanah