

#### Intimates: A Journey Towards Sacred Sexuality

Francis X. Kroncke

Copyright 2015 Francis X. Kroncke

# PART 1: COURTING
# CHAPTER 1

_Do you believe in love at first sight? I know it happens all the time._ A tune from his grandparents, sung to him since cradle-rocking days. Mark didn't care to remember the band, not even hum the tune successfully. It just came. Amidst beer slopping over juggled mugs, in-between smoke barrages: cigarettes in a windowless room—all hopping and shimmying, jolting and swaying to the catchy beat...his heart beating, his mind beaten, this nameless woman who has just sprung into his life, just flipped out from the underside of a cloud: "Smoky Angel!" What else could his romantically polluted mind yield but anticipation of a heavenly delight? So she was—she who was to be _ever was_.

" _Cilla_." But he thought she said, "Silly." He was quick with a flirty tone and _Come hither!_ glint in his enchanted eyes ,"Silly girl...do you believe in love at first sight?" But she didn't smile. She hadn't caught his misnomer; just thought his gesture and tone a bit tipsy rude— _Wasn't everyone by now?_ Then she hears it, _Silly_ at the same moment Mark, sensing his failure, flushes crimson and grins idiotically. Mercifully, she gets it, steps closer to his ear, speaks loudly—" _Cilla_." Mark sparked back to hot stepping around her....Who could hear—not here on the dance floor! Yelling over the reverberating sound, not just sound, but hot sound—heated by the bodies, thirty or more couples, raising heat to shimmering lust...holding down the quaking lid, harnessing near-boiling-over—' _til later!_ Instinctively, she had let out her name to tame him, to give him something: ancient shadows. She is unsettled by how tethered she feels by his look: green eyes— _How many guys have green eyes?_ —drilling her, grilling her, interrogating every aspect of her being. _More_ , she feels him ripping at her with his probing greens, trying to see through her clothes, see her naked. "Boys are like that!" But _his eyes_ : a nakedness more than just sex—inside, roaming around, peering. ("Is this the end of _Courting_?") This is what now alarms her. Him, an enticing, entrancing siren—"Mark!" "Rider!" Two shouts. He pitches his voice a screech higher, piercing...he wants her to know his name: " _MARK. RIDER_."

The band breaks. It was _that_ time. Would she come? Did she really think him silly?

Salvation came, "Cilla!" A female yell. He, still latched onto her face, only hearing, but in hearing, freed by the flash of her eyes in recognition. Again, "Cilla!" Enough quiet and dispersal of couples that she turns to her right and sees Lil waving her over. In a motion, which was too fast for him to be even stunned by, she grabs Mark's hand and tugs him—to all others a seemingly unwilling catch being dragged: hooked and landed.

"Live long and prosper!" Duet sing-song. In greeting; a glass of molasses dark froth extended.

The two women laugh—a secret amusement of sisterhood: sorority. _Mu Mu Chi_.

_What?_ on the faces of the males, collegians, not introduced, but sitting down in the booth as sharers of a dream, being there where each simply wanted to be— _with a girl_.

"Zav." No hand extended; a name and a head-bobbed check-off.

"Mark." Exact in ritual response.

Both wanted to ask, _What?_ Meaning what was his intention? Could they help one another get _there_? The girls were giggling, not in a ditzy way. "Priscilla" so it dawns on Mark, what her proper name is.

"Do you guys...?" Cilla broke from Lilith. But it was clear that the two hadn't met before.

Lil had just recently taken up with this guy Zav—an odd-ball in Cilla's eyes. Lil could have had so many, just anyone she wanted. She had that something all the guys wanted.

Cilla knew she was better looking than Lil. Had fuller breasts. Was a desired model for "Advanced Drawing Studio"—nude enchantress! Yet, Lil had that something even women noticed—something which drew men... _Maybe women?_... to her. Like warming at a winter's fireplace—the innocent image which routinely popped into a passer-by's minds—the _warmth_ she exuded.

"Mark." Teasing, tugging: "O, green eyes!" Lil's snatching voice draws him away, although he wasn't aware. "What's your major?"

_Anatomy!_ flew from his silent lips, for he had kidded himself for the last two years that all he wanted to truly, _in detail,_ study was women's bodies. "Accounting," flew from his slightly parted lips.

"Ooo," Lil sarcastically intoned, "no wonder you and Zav haven't met. He's a poet, did'ja know it?"

"Bad," Zav groans.

" _Bad_ ," Cilla mocks, twisting the word for another meaning; her head tilting as her eyes flare open-wide to express her mocking shock. "You're _Bad_ , Zav!" Eyes flashing possession of hidden secrets...Zav is annoyed, rankled that she knows.

_Bad?_ Mark glances warily at Zav. _What kind of Bad?_

After dropping off the girls— _His date, my what?—_ Mark is at that awkward moment when guys who know girls who know each other wonder whether or how or why they should get to know each other.

Zav just glances at Mark: "Night," and turns towards the parking lot.

"Night," Mark returns.

As happens, both end up, a half-hour later, at the same bar, _Fear and Trembling_ —aptly named for its student clientele—although, when once surveyed by Professor Ibar from _Soc._ , few knew its source either in terms of philosophy or inebriated parody.

Not ironically, the guys were at opposite ends of the bar.

They had noticed each other right away.

Each just drank.

Zav, port wine.

Mark, piss beer.

Only when it was shut down, did they accept the moment. Outside, leaning against a the bar's wall in the parking lot, Mark waited because he needed a hurried ride back to campus to beat the night-watchman. If not this Zav, _Then I'm screwed!_

Instead of chatter, Zav points, directs: "Get in."

He drives the mile over to his off-campus apartment: an upper-classman privilege. Dark and non-descript. A basement: full length of house. Windows with slight moonlight at headband height. Snores. _Roommate._ Zav hits a faint light exposing the outlines of a couch and chairs and smudges of other entities, but little enters Mark's mind, he just sits and waits. Zav is, within a drink-dulled moment of awareness, from lamp glow to beacon from fridge to handing him a beer: pale like he likes it...both sit.

"Fuck the drive." Which means, _Too tired to drive to campus. Sack out on the couch_.

Mark accepts and affirms with a flick of the bottleneck-tapping-forehead gesture outward to his host: drunken code.

Both drink, slow-mo quietly, for several moments.

" _Bad_?"

A long fuse before—chuckled, " _Bad!_ "

Liquid minutes...they drop their empties and sack out.

Mark wakes to a harshness of sound before the smell of eggs and bacon rouse him.

" _Three-fifty_. That covers it all, right?"

" _All_? You'll never be able to cover it all." Bitter. Nasty.

"Fuck you, Zav." Spitted.

Mark snatches a blur, big and bulky, a blur tall and thick, a guy with a duffel bag slung, snatches it as it is sucked up and out by the open door. Stomps on the up-stairs.

Mark—adjusting trousers, putting on shirt, shaking a leg, yawning—moves the two strides into the kitchen which appears as simply one sector of the huge basement: three interior doors. "There," finger-points Zav, knowing the need for morning watering. The others must be bedrooms. Set out: two plates, even a pitcher of _OJ._ Mark follows his call to wash up to wake up...reappears, hungry as he is, as the toast pops.

They eat it all—all the eggs: eight, scrambled. All the bacon: a package. All the toast: half a loaf. Swill coffee mugs of _OJ_. They eat methodically and don't talk. Zav reads the morning paper. Slips sections to Mark...Mark wasn't a morning paper reader. He just ate, feeling the food enter his belly, felt it as it encountered malingers of intoxication, those renegade molecules of alcohol which hide out waiting for morning—they wait to ambush marauding enemies of passion and delight, these sobering aliens who prophetically arrive at first light to calm the land, to imprison the sleepy libertines of uninhibited indulgence... _indigestion!_ He eats knowing that he will be pained by gas and be seeking to fart his way all morn— _Escape!_

"Cilla's quite the looker."

So, it began. Their conversation.

They talked about the girls. Checking each other out by the nuance of question and the betrayal of answer. They liked each other. Not that they were like each other, this they quickly grasped, but that they could each be mostly themselves before the other.

"Howie," pointing towards the door, "that's why I gave him the boot. Couldn't keep himself out of my space." Finger-tapping his head. Checks Mark's response: _accept that?_. "Plus, he's flunked out, anyways." Zav curves a lip of mirth. Mark nods his head, minutely swaying an indifferent "Okay."

"Plus," in a third and final comment, rising as he delivers it, "dislocated his shoulder. Lost his mega-ball scholarship."

Driving back to campus. Faithful _Mustang_. Ancestral steam-shifter. Winter beaten: rust freckled. Passably clean. Mark stashes sobering mental notes. He couldn't afford a car. _Could he hook up with Zav to date Cilla?_ Answer: "Why don't you pick up Howie's fumble? Save me time and money." Meaning, searching for a new roommate.

"How _Bad_?"

Zav laughs—that gleeful, naughty-teenage laugh which drives a parent nuts.

# CHAPTER 2

Cilla opens the box. A present a day all week. "Advanced _Courting_ "—like Lilith, she had heard the stories; now, a reality!

She knew it was him, though he didn't sign his name. _Unusual_. "Not even initials." Just a message, the repeating message, "You are my Smoky Angel!"

"Terrible!"

She laughs a small, mothering laugh. "He's not the poet. _You_ have the poet."

Cilla could hear him humming, "You are my Smoky Angel," as he wrote...writes cleverly...she likes _clever_. Yet, she intuits that this is the reach of his artfulness. Not like the pages of impassioned—"Incomprehensible, but impassioned!" she said to Lilith—poetry: "torrential avalanche" from Zav.

Today, a necklace. Silver chain with a modest stone, modestly sized but at once bold, brash, intense: _alluring._ She looks up in her "Gems of Love" and spies it, "Peridot!"

"He sent you his eyes. Get it?"

Cilla giggles giddily. Hands the gift to Lil. Cilla lifts her hair. Lil closes the snap.

Inside: peering.

"Quite the Romantic, _Mr._ _Accountant!_ " as the door shuts.

"Just drive," Mark over-rides—mildly commands, with satisfaction at his private triumph, sounding cool and _non-committal_.

Who's the Romantic? Who's the Seducer?

Sure, Zav's the poet but does his lines have hooks? Smirky inner grin. Mark wonders if Cilla has been hooked by his lines, his gifts. He is smugly pleased with the images of _f_ _ishing..._ reeling her in. Although he's not exactly following the approach taught in "Advanced _Courting_ ," he's confident that giving her gifts net his quarry more than Zav's effusive poetry. _Poet! Ha_.

Seeking to impress her with his cleverness, Mark went back and forth over whether to sign his name. He didn't want to ask Zav. Not anyone. They'd all had the same _Courting_ training: _Rules_ and _Protocols—_ at least he supposed it the same. But _Who cares?_ What counts is that Mark is about "The Game" in the way _he_ has long been planning. Now, _Courting_ will never be as _Courting_ has been!

Mark—seeing in his mind's eye himself wading into the river, casting the line, controlling the play, reeling in. _Methodical_. He didn't utter the word, but felt it. It was as methodical as he wanted it to be, _as it must be._ Sensing _Courting_ not so much as Game but as _War._ The training stressed "Play!" but he would be "Master"... _will be_. "War," this conquering image. "Master," this capturing word. He did not utter them, rather embodied them as in murmuring self-congratulation he wraps each gift/ First day, a flower, just one. "Yellow rose." Meaning to him not just love, that traditional message of the red, but yellow—"Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree!"...meaning, "I'm coming home!" Right from the start, he had to tell her, make her hear loud and clear, that she was his— _had to be his._ She must come to realize that she has been waiting for him...only him— _Fate_. He was possessed and obsessed by this. It is how he defined but deviated from _Courting._

"Even if she doesn't get it all, right now...." He wanders into an enveloping fantasy. She is waiting for him at home, coming home each day, she there, "Having to be there!"— _submissive_. With a steely clamp of his jaw he ties the ribbon of the first day's yellow rose.

Second day, a brooch. "Tasteful," said Lil, admiringly. Cilla pins it above her heart. _How did he know?_ But he hadn't. It had been dumb luck. "This, the only one you have?" as the scrunched faced old hag wizened, "Yup." So he wrapped it in blue. A silver brooch with a carved angel, one that looked oddly ancient: "Pre-Ascendancy?" _Impossibly not—_ and with intent wrapped it in blue. This gift more directly messaging that she "Is my angel. Smoky Angel." Not trying to capture smoky, rather stressing the angelic blue of heaven. "She'll get it." And she does.

Third day, a bracelet. Small beaded ebony chain with pearled flame. "Delicate," Cilla whispers. Lil was out. She presses the clasp. Lifts her left arm to dangle the opalescent flame in front of her eyes. Inexplicably, she snaps her head back—a primal reflex fearing fire—the shimmering flame licks at her wrist! Cilla gasps, and within the gasp the illusion retreats. " _Oh!_ "

Fourth day, a scarf. Satin. Black. Blindly black. Dressy. It is so striking that Cilla can't move herself to take it out of its box.

"Wow," Lil utters, eyes glued on the same darkened depthlessness.

It is Lil who lifts it from the box. Unfurls and fans it in front of Cilla's eyes. Deftly, the merest of a twist with a flip, she slips, ties it around Cilla's neck—deep forest cascade of caliginous water.

As it lays there, lays so "Beautiful!" secrets Lil, lays so strikingly against her long white neck, a neck which her mother calls, "Your treasure, hon," a neck which drew men to kiss: grandfathers and fathers, even brothers, especially lovers...the scarf kisses her neck, but as never kissed before— Cilla shudders.

"Are you going to wear them all?"

"Not any."

Lil understood... _then, she didn't_.

Mark was clearly eager to see her. His eyes consumed her but she couldn't discern whether or not he was seeing her; _noticing_.

_Naked_ : Mark had her everyway covered—it was his hand to _Play_.

"She'll pretend it's not you," Zav had said; felt he was forewarning. Felt that Mark wasn't ready for one like Cilla. Not that Zav knew Cilla that well, only as he figured from Lil's remark, "Women are coy." The puzzling tales from "Advanced _Courting_ " were coming to life.

Zav had been right. But Mark had, also, been more primed than Zav could have ever expected. For Mark knew his Fate. _She's the one!_

So he had prepared to be enigmatic. Even if she had worn one thing or carried the singular rose, he would express nothing, nothing disclosing, not even mild curiosity. Even if she had worn everything, he would have ignored all, not even commenting with polite banter. _Zav could not have understood_ : "Be her date, not her lover. Make her suffer!" A cloud of unknowing.

Mark wants her to suffer—not incapacitate her, but control her through intricate anguish—constructing a web. He could never let her know him as simple or easy to understand. Not be predictable. Had to keep her off-balance. More than mysterious; aloof. _Trump her!_

His was an impulse quite in character with his temperament. Mark, no anarchist. Mark, no _Rule vigilante_! No. Rather, it was his rule-keeping that compelled him—true compulsion...a doing without self-knowing. He moving beyond _Courting_ mores and morality, into the realm, the essence of his being. If he had reasoned, he would have calmly and coolly discoursed: "Pleasure is our Game—the credit. Suffering is the debit." It was a matter of columnar balance.

So he craftily prepared to make her suffer, "Anyway I can," as he finishes buttoning his shirt, combing his hair. _Fate!..._ unheard, un-uttered, understood umbilically.

"I'm just dying," groaned with expiring sigh. Lil brushes her hair vigorously, eyeing Cilla through the shared _Ladies Room_ mirror.

"You?" She daintily dabs her forehead with a touch of a hand-towel. " _Me._ I'm the one who can't figure." Turns to face Lil, "It _has_ to be him. Doesn't it? _Smoky Angel?_ "

Lil shrugs a Maybe. _Maybe he's a kook_ ?.. Shut-up; ssssh, no advice!

Zav sits one out. Watches Lil dance with another. But that's not it. No, he's sitting out because of the moment, what he calls "A poetic moment." Feeling—not always requiring a glass of the Muse's blood—feeling his fingers twitch. "Writing fingers," he holds before him, indicts them—a pencil, thick, child-size, soft lead, almost a drawing pencil, jotting on his pad, this time watching Mark and Cilla, not Lil.

But he cannot write, no, not at this moment. He can only record. For he cannot describe what he has never seen before. Images. Words. Sounds. Scribbles. Jottings on his memory slate.

...in a crowd, but all alone. just two. one orbiting. the other swinging the other in orbit. like a yo-yo. around the world. walking the dog. _asleep_. like they're asleep. no, everyone else is asleep. no one is watching!. ...he enwraps her in roses. head to toe. yellow roses. cocoons her. carries her off. she is naked. he decks her out in jewelry. precious stones and gold and silver: drapes her and drapes her. scarfed, full body wrapped—mummy, death-black, wrapping into shimmering veil of sightless ebony shiver...untill she _disappears!_ —takes her eyes and gives her his: twin gleams, life-flushing greens, verdant. beams locking each inside the other: _cyclops._..from the cocoon of roses she peeks, wings forth, flaps, but no flight, has molted, no longer a caterpillar, but, _But!_ —she is chained to him, she does fly about, circles, whirls...it is her heart which is chained: chained by his desire, lustful desire: pearlescent flames of cool, cold, frost-biting ferocity—a painful cry, a tortured scream! _Unbearable!_...Zav jolts, lurches forward, hands flat on the table, sweating profusely, hard-breathing... _chilled_ : in his mind just one word, "Chilled," title for a poem?. ..Lil returns, laughter still on her lips. Mark and Cilla return: "Live long and prosper!" Mark winks: emerald glint, smiling a wicked lick as he shocks Zav with this knowledge, his special knowing: _chilled_

Lil catches the zing between the guys; Cilla's still bubbly and zoned on Mark. Something's happened, _but what?_

_Wow_ , to herself. Muted. Adding bubbles to Cilla's giddiness. All at once eager for their sisterly late night chat.

# CHAPTER 3

The one thing Lil didn't especially like abut Cilla was her pattern of drinking: a glass of wine when depressed, one when something smack-in-the-face good happened, maybe two or three when "just bored out of my mind," and _whenever else—_ just about any time for any reason. The pattern was: one glass, then she stopped counting...not stopped drinking, just stopped counting, till she drank the bottle...and if it was anytime before ten p.m. she'd drink the bottle and any others around. _Miraculously—_ and the word poked itself into her brain at these moments of reflection—miraculously, she never got stinking drunk. "You're drunk," Lil could say that, but it was only because Cilla had stopped talking. _Full_ _Stop._ Mute. Tongueless. Not falling down or dropping things or wetting her panties, just stone-cold silent. So, Lil knew when Cilla was profoundly drunk.

_Cilla has been silent for over ten minutes_.

"I went _Round-the-World..._ and I still can't tell!" The first glass...he last as to count.

"Maybe, you're not _his_ Smoky Angel!?"

Another...but no one's counting.

"Not _me_?"

"Let's see, think about it. What did he say when he called?"

"He didn't. Zav did."

"Really?!"

"Said Mark would be moving in next month, end of semester and, and just assumed, said, "Pick you both up at 7," like it was a set thing or something....thought you knew."

"Aw, can't be him. Why'd a guy do something like this?"

"Like...?"

"Like fawn all over you with gifts and stuff and not stake his claim. Not want something _back_ for it. After all, it's _his_ time, now." His time—the End of _Courting_ , the Beginning of _Coupling—_ her time.

"Like, his taking off before the date ends. Goes against the way we've all been taught to _Play_."

Looking blankly at each other. Lil not wanting to judge. Cilla off into a zombie space.

"Not everyone's as _Bad_ as Zav." Slurred titter.

_Silent._ But she could still see his eyes. No. Still feel them. _Isn't that what this guy's about? What makes him different? You so interested?_

Like all night he'd never let you out of his sight. Even when out of the room, you could feel them, couldn't you? _The scarf...even when you first took it off, like you couldn't! Incredible. He's still here—spooky!_ Hmmmm. Hell, how can I tell _her_? The first guy you really— _Really!—_ wanted to undress you with his eyes! To look at you and examine every piece of your body. _Not like all the others; not to date, anyway..._ Like when he held my hands he was seeing what I was touching, how I hold the salt shaker, how I fold my hands in prayer, wipe the sweat after gym.. _Great Mother!_ I could see it all over him... _he had to have_ sent me all those things. _But_ , didn't care...doesn't care—why? ...How can I tell Lil? That—they were _my_ gifts to him? Hell, what does that mean?...Is this how _Coupling_ feels?

_Mother!_ I'm his Smoky Angel, I know it!

"Maybe, you should've worn something, at least one?"

"Maybe...I don't think so."

"He's just a jerk? Sorta _Bad_?"

"No. Don't think so. Sorta different. _Creative_ , maybe."

"Creative? You were feeling pretty rotten; _down_. Can't hide that from me, Sister."

" _Accountant_. I don't think you _can_ fully understand." Fades off into sighful reverie.

Lil didn't catch the "can" at first. Her mind was racing along some psych profiles she'd been studying in "Abnormal Psychology," her first upper-division class; the profiles had fascinated her.

" _Janus_ ...." almost whispered.

The two were speaking in the same room but not on the same plane.

Cilla was almost at absolutely silent...last drink.

"Two-faced or double-sided or maybe just a Trickster...what _did_ Doctor Madden say about that type? ... _Perverse_? Ugliness from some lingering meta-genetic pollution?...Wow, wouldn't that be something!" _Wild thought_.

"He's deep. That's what he is— _deep_."

It was as if a dead-bolt had clunked into place, securing the door. The thump of perfect silence actually drew her to a physical turn. She watches Cilla exhale and sink into the mattress. Pillow drawn over her eyes.

Lil knew that she could only leave.

"Every ledger has two columns. Debits. Credits. _Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha!_...He certainly is creative!" _Deep._

# CHAPTER 4

" _Bad?_ " intrigued Mark.

Zav had proven to be a regular guy, a normal student: studied, drank, talked sports, bragged about women...the usual stuff.

Was it a joke?

"My ancestors—even parents—resisted _The Ascendancy_." Hesitantly, clarifying: "Somewhat."

Great Moroni's Toot! Who says that in public? Even if it was three centuries ago?!

Shocked, but more like itchy with fascination—a paleontological discovery shock: _knew it once existed but not today!_ "So...you don't have sex?" Couldn't stifle the incredulity...the amazement of the fact.

Zav's head bobbed a bit: up and down, swayed sideways, quite tiny movements as if his head were on a spring; lips pursed. He hadn't discussed this in years, not with Howie, not since Delantra back in high school..."No."

_No? What kind of no? No I don't. No I do?_ "What?" a calm inquiry; not trying to flush the quail, not ever having stalked quail before!

"No. Yes. I'm not a virgin if that's all you're asking." _Snicker_.

Zav had been washing the few glasses they possessed, all other implements being paper—to cook, to eat—glass being quite special, personal, not rare, but commonly not-used. Zav had told him: "Don't like putting recycled crap sheets to my lips." Mark understood, but it never bothered him. He rather liked the glass, even if Howie had used it...Mark trusted sterilization.

Washing, now walking out of the room, moving in that way which told Mark, "That's it."

What type of woman is Lil? She _must_ know? No? Girls were trained to detect _that_ , weren't they?.. _Mother!_ back home he'd been stoned, naw, just run out of town. _Loaded_. They would've locked up their daughters when he walked the streets! "Ship him off to the Sahara!" or something. _Ha._ Must've been some, after all Zav qualified to be a _Public Menace_.

Mark, as everyone his age, has been through " _Courting_ for Beginners" or as they dubbed it, "The Course." He knew _Bad_ to be the most trifling of terms while being the most damning. Playground kids bandied it about, teasing, while ignorant of its more foreboding overtones. A foreboding picked up in The Course where the matter was not directly approached, instead, where a teacher would toss off an image, a metaphor, a clunky phrase, all the time probing her troops searching _for what?_ Everyone knew something was happening, something of import was being said, yet no one asked, "Teacher, what exactly do you mean by _Bad_?"

Mark—ever shrinking grand ideas down to digestible bits—cut and pasted notes and random thoughts in his digital ledger: " _The Dumb Age_. Hard to imagine, but _pre-Ascendancy_. People lived as if only themselves, not as _Couple!_ Sexual savagery. No Rules. No Protocols. Male and female as Enemy. _War of the Sexes_. No self-control. No communal vision. Not yet an erotic cosmic vision. Not yet star-bound Parents. Not just deviants, but middle-class people, like your parents...most of you. Sex was not a matter of the soul!"

Although the lesson's stress was on "not a matter of the soul," Mark underlined and circled the phrase "War of the Sexes." He could never get more details, but the phrase clanged a gong in his quite unmusical brain.

As happened more often than not, when lecturing on pre-Ascendancy years, more was left unsaid then said. Indeed, only a few would come to know more (" _Only Deacons!"),_ absorb the full import of _The Ascendancy_ as an intergalactic crisis of sex and spirituality. A moral crisis which was rooted in "Dumb Age" beliefs.

"Dumb Age" was another portentous phrase elusively grasped. A globe-swallowing moral crisis about which, for ages, scholars had written. Preachers had preached. Politicians had railed!

"Dumb" until the "New Truths." A premise of which was that there was no way to ground the practice of erotic healing in a Dumb creed which held the body to be _Bad_ , and stated dogmatically that sexual embrace was the cause of a cataclysmic First Sin...and of most subsequent sins.

_Bad_ Truths which were iron-collars—circular, self-imprisoning. Until the first Ascended voices proclaimed:

"Too much guilt," averred the appointed and revered _Psychotherapist Laureate_.

"Too much sin," averred the appointed and revered _Preacher Laureate_.

"Too much suffering," averred the appointed and revered _Masseuse Laureate_.

For the boys and girls, "The Course" which they broad-stroked as "The Bad Faith," although "Bad" was not expansively discussed nor reflected upon. _Evil_ being a word only scholars used. "About all things Dumb, the less said, the better," was the perennial mentoring guidance given to all.

"What happened back then," stumbling for teaching words, bridging words, buffering words: hurting with alien, _Dumb_ words, "was a regeneration which was effected by _The Ascendancy_ , which is _The Ascendancy_ ...that's _all_ you need to know. Believe it. _Simply, don't doubt_."

_Regeneration_ : not reform, not restoration, but the finding of a totally unique, virgin, untapped, mysterious seed, source—"Creation is you," is The First Truth now catechized.

"That's about it!"—the pedagogical safety-bolt clangs shut.

Where and how Mark " _really got it!"_ was upon hearing it all boiled down to what would become a highly memorized and oft repeated creedal brief of the New Truths—first memorized to pass the entrance exam for The Course:

"Sexual coupling is the creative starting point and moment. It is that embrace which links two bodies and positions them as foci on the spiritual ellipse. Once coupled, the mystery and reality of _The Ascendancy_ occurs. Namely, that while remaining two, a new oneness, a new Presence emerges. It is an emergence which is birthing—the new birthing of two, already alive in time and space, as one, and as they uncouple, as never the same again. Pleasure is eternal, forever—soulful. To erotically embrace is to evoke _ever-lasting_ _presence_."

Such truths were simplified in the _"Ten Year Old Boy Translation_ ...simply, "Testosterone! _Balls!_ Yippee!" It was _the day_ , _the moment_ , he began to look at girls—hook them, snare them with his mastering green eyes.

Mark could hardly wait till thirteen...when _Courting_ begins!

Zav returns: "You want to know. Know _this_." Sits down on the couch. Mark gets up from the kitchen table, three-steps and sits down on the only other chair in their living room.

"My parents went half-way. Fixed my brother."

Mark's mind is in silent commentary. _Amazing!_

"They're like that. Whole family's like that. Anyways, as they tell it. My grandparents for centuries back had done the same. An interminable line of old fashioned biologists! ( _Sigh_.) Ones—although believers and _Ascended_ , they did so part-way...hypothesized that the body might be _somewhat Bad..._ thought the mind possibly separate from the body...that the Final Ascension could be purely _mental_ evolution. Called themselves "agnostics." _Body doubters._ Were proud of it. Could be proud back then. So, they experimented. Wanted to see if there was a moral...what, how'd they say it?..."neuro-synapse"...something like that, a physical bridge. Whether if you dammed the body—meaning, no sex, whether the soul...if there was a distinct soul...whether it'd be changed. _I had nothing to do with this, you understand_."

"Ledgers. Like you're a debit and your brother's a credit." Mark was almost enthused.

"Sorta," somewhat miffed by the image: too stiff.

"Sorta. But it's becomes a, um, how to say it? A mission. A _secret_ family mission. There are others you know. Somehow they will contact me. So I'm told."

"But if no sex, how'd you get born?"

"No sex even while having sex." _Casual._

(" _I'm a poet! Get it?")_

"Bad!"

("Bullshit!")

_Fixed._ Mark remembers the day. Birthday boys, gleefully in their newborn birthday suits, embarrassed but, more, emboldened—"Hoist 'em high!" was the bathroom howl.

_Thirteenth_. A handful of other guys were there. They all eyed each other with barely restrained drool, for from this day forward they could "Do it!" All it took was a painless—but ever famous "The Shot"—injection and a simple, fifteen minute procedure...not even anaesthetized.

Each was now " _Courting_." Each had received his certificate, a graduate of " _Courting_ for Beginners _._ "

Each had manfully swelled and accepted the Mission issued by the teacher as he handed out completion certificates, "Love freely!"

The crowd cheered. Their parents hugged them. Younger brothers waited at home, eager to now step up to "Next in line!"

But more importantly— _girls!_ Girls began to talk with them...naturally, girls thirteen and older, they who had also received their certificates, having heard in their separate room and time: "Do what you must!" girls...by yourself or with others, touch them, invite them "over."

" _Roll me over in the clover!_ " The spicy chant of those "Gone a' _Courting_!"

"It's easier than you think," Zav spoke, answering Mark's unvoiced question. "There's a fairly wide network of medicals who will forge _Fixed_ paper." Pointing towards his room, "You can read my diploma." It was a pointing gesture without his head turned, but not without a whiff of mirthed laughter.

_Diploma._ "Show me," she said. Mark did. She undressed. It was like magic. "A passport to the realm of love. It's magic," and the teacher, Mr. Oblonsky, had played an archaic, now legendary, _Boy's Tune_ , "It's magic in a young man's heart!" that hums in Mark's mind till this moment, every time he readies for sex.

Mark believes Zav: "He's _Courting_ , that's all I need to know." _Trust_. "Trust his bullshit!"

"Lil knows?"

"Maybe."

" _Maybe?_ "

"We kid about it. When I first seduced her...believe me it was a _romantic_ seduction! At the just right moment I whispered, "I'm _Bad_ "—just to spike the mood. But she believed me, I think. _Somehow_." The tone was spiced with perplexity.

"Possibly, really, she doesn't know?"

"Do you know?"

Jokester?

# CHAPTER 5

Lilith didn't like Mark. That she said to herself, talking to herself to make sure that she really meant it. "He's a bastard!" she says to no one. Finished combing her hair.

"Boy, are you misreading him!"

"You still don't know, do you?"

"Of course I know!"

"Yeah."

Yeah.

"Smoky Angel my ass!" a vulgarity not often heard by Zav, not from Lil.

"Smoke and Mirrors is more like it!"

Not gonna get laid tonight, bud.. Mark you asshole!

Mark had liked the sex. Who didn't? No guy ever complained about it. Not the least he heard. What else was _Courting_ all about?

The Shot shut down disease. The Fix turned the spigot off till _Coupling_. It was all green light: " _Play!_ "

So, Mark did. Played. But in his own way: screwed, fucked, jammed, rammed, humped, laid, hammered, nailed. He liked "hammered and nailed!" best.

Words which made him "Feels good!" he stroking his rod.

("Feels _Bad_! _Oh, sooooo Bad!_ ")

Whatever a boy would say, no girl would question. Animal terms. Mechanical terms. Farming terms...there were simply no "dirty words" since _The_ _Ascendancy_. No images called "filthy." No acts which merited the label, "pornographic." Such was the complete erotic victory captured during _The Ascendancy_ with the vanquishing of the practices of the Dumb Faith. _Forgotten._ This Victory they were revelers within was _Forgotten_.

_Bad_ of "The Dumb Faith," meaning that "all is _Bad_." Body and Soul. Terms of the Dumb Faith, not of the Ascended Faith. The human heart, back then, as font of now arcane...now, vastly diluted...beliefs, words, concepts such as _sin_ and _guilt_. Which when placed at the heart of daily life fomented a primal vision of the "War of the Sexes."

"War" of the Dumb Faith now misunderstood by most but as a Game with no _ascensions_.

Even for Mark (" _Especially for Mark?!_ ") "Bad" is not even Bad as _Bad_ was. The boys, the girls, they do not know Evil _Bad_. Not even the teachers fully know. (" _Someone must!")_

Discourse on this has been silent for the last century, left only to the appointed scholars.

Just enough was taught..."To pass your certification test." Some more was taught in the last year but often it was only during the last days that the boys crammed some phrases, jammed some story-line into their heads...soon to be forgotten, vanishing as the test final was submitted. Zav's notebook's jottings:

"The unAscended world was divided. People saw Sex as either totally Good or totally Bad. Sex is holy. Sex is sinful. Humans are holy. Humans are sinful. Words which divided, filled with unembracing hatred. _No forgiveness! No Regeneration!_ Everyone went in circles. For decades. For centuries."

Exasperated sigh. Others watching the clock, readying for the bell. More notes: "The Pill hadn't helped. The condom give-way hadn't helped. The New Truths were being revealed. That Regeneration wouldn't be mechanical. Not a matter of procedure, alone."

In those last comments made on the last day, the teacher mutters what she knows couldn't be fully heard or grapsed... _Not by greenies!_ That, "They simply didn't _Couple_. Had no _Courting_ ,"

"The Law of Unintended Consequences," Zav scribbles, boldly and in capitals, in the margins as the bell clatters "Class over!"

No further explanations!

The teacher, silently monologuing, assembling loose papers into folders, end-of-the-cycle: _War of the Sexes. A Dumb belief. Thank Our Parents we've Ascended!_

_Is this the secret?_ _That the erotic embrace can't be programmatic?_

Zav had been taught, by his parents, about "The other meaning to that Law." Not about consequences, but about intention.

"There can be no consequence where there is no intention." Father? Mother? Guess both said it, one time or another. _Many times!_

_Good_ _Intention_. It was everything which _Courting_ was. " _Play_. You are intended for _everyone_. Everyone is intended for you. Do not care for the particulars. Not your lover's personality. Just _Play!_ "

Still, _Courting_ was anything but careless or aimless. In fact, exacting care was given to details. _The Rules_ spelled out the many protocols, definitions, obligations, responsibilities . So, _The Rules_ was a thick book; a veritable tome—the standard gift once thirteen. Not unexpectedly, the Number One book eagerly read by every pube.

_Is this the secret?_ _That it can't be programmatic. That to be Bad, then, is to Ascend? To embrace with Bad Intention?_

Zav closed this final notebook. Consigned it to a dark space within his beat-up foot-locker...into a darker space within his mind and soul.

_Play_ was artful. There were defined looks. Her eyes shadowed in _that_ way, with the flash of a thin line of ochre, warned, "Just one." _Tonight just one. Singular conflagration. Total consummation!_ The boy knowing the offer—"Round-the-World!"...that he'd have to bribe the many others to withdraw, stand-back, let only him into this circle of raging fire.

Practicing _Romantic Seduction of Just Two—_ he offers her a flower: symbolizing himself. _Protocol 13_ stated that it had to be of purple cast: scarlet at best. Without this he could not speak, she could not hear. With it, their night was solitary, like unto a deep well. They threw themselves into each other. _Fiery Pit!_

She came to desiring this deepening shade of crimson once she had taken so many that she knew that one was all she needed. One through whom she had them all. One who became her Only One because he was All— Everyone.

_Scarlet_ : a girl's indicating a readiness to advance to _Coupling_.

Cilla met Mark at scarlet.

Most times, _Play_ was like a choreography. Movement not always dance, but in a practiced manner. Boys moving about the room, spying the moment to move in and become part of the Embrace. Timing it so that they would have their part. She accepting them or rejecting them if they stumbled!...herself, accepting the widening circle, the fuller Embrace as other girls attached.

_Rules_ : there were numerous rules, even rules about rules, which were all an annoyance to the young but of great Purpose to the teachers...they wanted dancing, not a brawl, not a free-for-all, not a downward motion of any sort, no, Politeness and Being Considerate and the Art of the Gift and to capture Poise and Beauty. Rules were like ruled paper, they helped the Greenies to draw the proper notes, to effect the melody, to set the beat. _Rules_ which, without their knowing the young learned so as to _Play_.

_Play_ was like a Great Wheel which spun magically about the room to which boys and girls hitched themselves and spun, _spun_ , spun into the realm of pure Playfulness—dizzying, altering their consciousness, being whirled into fantasy and fabulous enchantments. _Play_ being, in the norm, a _Play_ of multiples, a multiplying of bodies and souls, of kisses and touches, of fondlings and orgasms...it was the purpose of _Courting_ to express the mutli-faceted personalities of each boy and girl. Not that they discoursed in so intellectual a way! _Hardly never_. But that they did just _Play_.

To _Play_ "by the Rules" meant to be intentionally unintentional. To become not personal but collective, then communal. To be so communal as to advance to the next phase, to _Coupling_ which was, in sharp contrast, to become unintentionally intentional.

Zav floundered and flopped about when he tried to straighten out intentionality and unintentionality. _What difference would it make?_ he often queried, seeking answers from his now departed parents—What difference would it make, since I don't know what it would be like not to be different?

Their parental curse and blessing was "Intend and be intimate." This is all Zav really knew as _Bad_. How encoded was this message from his parents, his heritage? At thirteen they had whispered the sentence, the practice. As if upon hearing he would know what it meant. _Do I?_

Is this what I sense about Lil ? Is she one, too? Not that girls got Fixed, but that she's seeking to become _intimate_?

He had not whispered the phrase to her.

He had whispered, " _Bad_ ," more as a teaser, but she had paused...then assumed "69." But instead of her mouth she placed his cock-head directly upon her forehead, and said to him something he had never heard, "I see you with my Bad-Eye."

He ate her ravenously.

Mark had heard about these " _Bad_ people." Not been taught. "They were wiped out," said simply, but "True?" No one answered. Truth: locker-room type education. You couldn't tell by looking at a guy. Besides, anyone could make a cut. Have the Fixed scar. But, _hell, why do I need to worry?_

So, he hadn't. _Didn't_.

For these last six years he's just been screwing away. Preferred, as in "Preferred Vintage," _screwing_ as his motivational word. Liked the ripping movement of the image! Liked to image it when he moved in on her! "Screwed to the floor, bitch!"

Yet there was one thing unresolved. Something had happened¤No big deal! But it nagged him every now and them. _When? With whom?_ _That boozer from Fargo? Or that milk-maid from Des Moines. Father! Did she have a set of pails!_ They made him _Moooo!_

Whomever. She said, "Don't!" as she shied away, shielded her eyes.

"Don't _what?_ " flushed with nervous anxiety that he'd lose his hard. It had taken him too much time this time— _Hate long seductions!—_ to get this one to kneel down and pump him!

She was half-turned on the bed, naked, legs crossed: _No open gate?_

_Shit on this!_ He rolls her over and hammers his way in...chucking out his image of _screw_ for one of _hammer and sledge_. ... _Fuck!!!!!!!_

"She mews about _his eyes!_ " Sarcasm.

"Yeah?"

"She doesn't get it...it is his eyes!"

Later that night Zav is waiting for Mark. _Gotta get his game._ Waiting. Thinking. Analyzing. "Maybe he asked because he is?" _Naw, no one ever talks about it straight, at least that's what everyone's taught._ That's why he so brashly kicks it around—made his parents worried sick. "Just stop blabbing!" his Dad had yelled. But he wasn't his Dad...Zav knew that.

Mark key-scratches the door...finds Zav up without the Flicker on but with a tall mug of dark wine. "She didn't put out?!" laughed, a half-mocking, half-sympathetic jibe-inquiry. When he failed to slip the Big One he always drank himself to sleep, so Mark just assumed.

Zav flips him the bird.

"I know you sent her that shit. Don't _Play_ me with that. I don't know your Game, but you've got them riled up. Both of them."

Mark did not betray his glee.

"You _Bad_?" Zav struck him with a prosecutor's mis-directing cross; drunk-hope.

Mark froze the beer lip to lip.

"Is this how _Bad_ people do it? Confuse 'em? Throw them off the mark? Don't let her do what she knows she _has_ to do?"

"Joseph Smith be praised." Prayerfully.

Zav realized that he and Mark had more in common than their differences.

# CHAPTER 6

So had it begun. Their lives. Marking back to these months, his junior, her sophomore, marking not just their lives together as a couple but their lives as a family: collective, _extended family_ , coupled as a foursome in a curious way like trains linking...a claw and a clasp and a clunk and a chugging forward.

Mark and Zav had both just turned twenty. It was as eagerly awaited as thirteen had been. Back then it was "The Course" and the green light to " _Courting_ "—have sex...all that you wanted, whenever you wanted, with whomever you wanted.

To uninhibitedly jump naked into the rimless pool of women-flesh. As much and as many as you could grab as you dived under. Deep down into the watery embrace of "females." At least women who weren't twenty. For twenty was the next stage, the mark hit for entering " _Coupling_ "—marriage and having babies... and all that".

Men were unFixed at twenty.

There was always bragging when recalling the Fixed Years. Preferring for the first years to call it "Being Fixed" rather then " _Courting_ "—a term deemed too romantic, too gushy, but one which came back to them at seventeen, which was not a new level as much as a turning-point, a fine-tuning, as in "sighting the target." But..., _Ah!_ those Fixed Years!

"A hundred, no more, no less. Set myself a goal. And kept it." Zav could almost believe Mark. Knowing him now this full year as not just a linear thinker but as the quintessential accountant. One who pleasured to fill in the boxes in sequence: _columns-rows_. Check them off. Could see him forever— _On a_ _nother planet!_ —working a spreadsheet with names and dates and data about each and everyone.

"For my rookie year, I couldn't get past foreplay!" He sounded ironically wounded. "They'd start stroking me and I'd rocket to the moon." He was working hard to suppress laughing at himself as he once-was. "When I got enough control, I couldn't get past fellatio! Gods and Goddesses, I must've ended up hand-firking more broads than any man alive!"

Zav rolls his eyes: _Great bar-room trawler, this one!_

Mark was just getting himself worked up...he liked his own yarn!

"By sixteen, I'm so good I could break two of them before I pulled the trigger!" He sips at his beer, "What was it like for you?" but he really didn't mean this as a question to be answered, just a way to keep Zav, or anyone, still on the line. "I mean it changed in the last two years. Maybe not for you. Did this happen?" A serious tone. It nabbed Zav's attention.

"I realized I was being used. _Know what I mean_?"

Where's this going?

He took a long chug. Paused. Looked beyond, not at Zav. Spoke in that way which reached something inside of Zav which he wasn't aware Mark was reaching.

"Do you know— _Truly know?_ —how many men just one woman can have in a night?" A flush of unexpected innocence.

Zav almost got out an answer.

"This Mirabell. She was the first to tell me, no, brag, _bitch!_ I felt used before I even screwed her." Anger neither paused to handle. "She told me she had just had five guys this night!" Halted. Not looking at anyone; listening to himself. "Then said she was just an apprentice. _Apprentice_?!"

"Bitch!"

"What did she mean, _apprentice_?"

"I don't know. Was too bewildered to ask. _Too_ , too embarrassed." _Brain-firked is more like it!_

There was a bond forming, swelling, engulfing them.

"I've thought of this."

Mark— _Has he heard me?_ Still locked in upon himself.

"That's what poetry means to me, guy. That _what is, is not_. Are you with me?"

Surprising Zav, Mark answers in a clear, controlled voice, with an alert, "I'm with you."

This is how their bond grew. It was based on the simplest attraction, that of diametrically opposed forces. In Mark's world there was simply the grid, the spreadsheet, the columns for plus and minus. It made all of Zav's puffy and mystical and airy and magical language—"It's all metaphorical, fellow, that's it!" —made all that clear to him: "Plus. Minus. Always one with the other. Never without."

So, the poet and the accountant bonded; welded joint.

(" _Bullshit!_ ")

Zav felt impelled to share. He was responding to Mark's curious energy, his alien way...was himself lured to drop some data into one of the columns. "Am I plus or minus?" _But what difference does it make?_

"Something like that happened to me... _really_. It was an older woman. Ya know, just a week or so from her twentieth. Me, just after my first _Cauldron_. Damn, if it hadn't been for that, I would've never touched her. I think, I'm sure!...I was her last _greenie_." _Greenie weenie_ , he did not utter! "Taunted me. If I hadn't been so stupid, I would've been pissed. But I _was_ green. _Toot! Toot! weren't we all!_ "

Both doused and aroused their cocking-fire with spirited flammables.

"She must've had someone who was _Bad_. Don't know. Really confused me. She's the first one to call me "poet"...before I even started reading. That's what "poet" means to me, I mean what I saw that evening, what _she made me_."

"Shit, Zav, what's the fucking point?" Garbled and paced in funereal beat, Mark was getting oiled and nasty, this the first and _last!_ sign of his impending sloppily soused drunkenness.

Zav had learned, quickly, how to avoid him when this alarm sounded, but tonight he wanted to hang in.

"The point's, _she_ screwed me! ... Screwed me up good. Fucked my mind. Played me like the harp. Picked me, string by string. Plucked out my soul, guy, believe me."

" _What's the fuck she'd do what's the fuck she'd do what's the fuck she'd do?!_ " screamed as he threw one empty, then another...Mark was up and headed for the hard stuff: _Ouzo_.

Zav was rocked. It was the same fierce energy. As on that night. But now, instead of avoiding Mark, he couldn't wait to share... _shit, to drain!..._ the bottle of _Ouzo_.

Within the half-hour: ardently drunk. Racked and soused and having kicked at the furniture, burned a bushel of incense, stunk up the place with stupid-drunk vomit. _Moroni!!_ goes round Zav's head. _Firking Moroni! Firking Toot!_

"She kept you? What was she, an Amazon?"

"Wasn't her strength. Fuck, I'm no _schwarzeneggar_ but no broad can keep me down." Sloppy, dribbling speech—each decoded into clear text.

"But I couldn't leave, guy. Like that. Like I'd never been firked like that. Like," he puked, a small puddle, into a blanket: no need to pause..."Like she wanted me there. Not like the others. Ya know, we had the green light. Just ask. They couldn't refuse. It was _Rule Number Three_. They're there for our pleasure. Capital P, ole fart face Oblonsky sez. Can hear him, "Capital P, my boys. Mother and Father calls you to capital P Pleasure!"...Hell, we knew the girls liked it—didn't we?" Not wanting an answer. "We're _Ascended_ _!_ Gods and Goddesses. Building-up our love to cosmic love. Like vitamins and exercise. We're needed to firk, daily. Ain't we _Ascended_?!"

Both had passed out. Hours. Wretched sleep, but not for the sharing.

Zav woke. The smell was foul; he dry vomited. His head was dead. "Shouldn't have done this," but it was a lecture he would not finish. Got up and went to pee.

Mark was in dreamland. But somehow still hearing Zav. Still watching Zav as he tells his story...in his dream actually seeing Zav, actually feeling as Zav feels...being a poet!

"You _are_ my baby, you know that?"

"You're a babe yourself, lady."

"No." She slaps his hand; odd. " _My baby_ ," as she strokes her belly.

"I'm safe," Zav leans towards her, to assure her.

"No male is ever _safe_ ," uttered with a twist he did not, could not catch.

"No. No. Look, I'm safe. Trust me. I always use rubbers, just in case of miracles!" and he half-snorts a laugh as he says "miracles"...dangles the shriveling condom in front of her face.

She lays back; eyes staring at the ceiling. All he need do is tap her knees and she's his, _again_.

"Understand," as she slowly, ever so slowly widens her legs, "Understand, you're my baby." Words as he penetrates, "I'm not _your_ babe!"— _hers_.

_Zav's okay_. Almost the words which woke him up. Waking up, catching the many pains of his body, his bones, his gut. Instantly catching Zav in soundless motion cleaning up the room: heavy clouds of orange blossom incense suffocating foully; liberating a moment's displeasure.

Watching Zav. Still like the dream. "What she said," he wanted to testify, "I understand that. She knew my Game was really just beginning. That the roles were being reversed. She was being moved from asset to liability. _Coupled_. Get it?"

He knew Zav got it.

Now, to get Cilla and Lil. _Hmmmm._

# CHAPTER 7

The bond between Priscilla and Lilith had also grown, stimulated by their shared views on _Courting_ and _Fixed_ boys. "Boys" was how they were taught to call them, implying a playfulness if not a sense of subliminal superiority. The Course, for them was also simply that they could have "All the boys!" they wanted...a guiding slogan of their sexual training, the élan of _Courting._ "Take as many as you like! As often as you like!" Always riding a chuckle or a gleeful look shared by teacher and students.

Both girls had few questions to raise, at least not in the early years. For who could repel the command to " _Play_!"? To stop childish frolicking simply with your sisters and girlfriends and open-wide the world of playing with boys—to enter the Game?

"Boys" with whom they had sand-box and kick-ball played now and then but with whom as both transformed found that they, themselves, were _Play..._ this, the Game.

For this they had patiently, thoroughly, and expectantly prepared. The Course claiming one year apart for both sexes, not a total segregation...they danced, they played...but a mental, spiritual isolation. During The Course girls were taught about boys and boys about girls. They were each taught the same "The Grand Story." Again, the practical import—not the whole meaning—of "The Ascendancy." Again, few even vaguely intuited that there was a "fuller" Story of which they lived but a part.

Few knew more than the Gathering Day rendition of The Ascendancy. For them it was not a matter of a church or a religious sect, for, indeed, there were no such divisions, only the Gathering Day as, in itself, the expression of their spirituality. Theirs was a heritage of centuries past which "Once Upon A Time" issued forth in a "Revelation." There being no need to discuss an Apocalypse or a "Latter Day" for there was no sense of "former days." It was simply Revelation, all effecting "The Ascendancy" which defined both the Beginning and the End of The Course.

The songs they heart-stomped and shouted to the rafters; the murals festooned in every Gathering room; the theater presentations in dance, eloquent elocution, visual stimulation; the annual festivals and picnics ...in every sense, dramatic and comic, they were fed this Grand Story.

"Ascendancy" was insight— _Generation_ : a New Sight, a way to see the other in ways they had not seen, although many had flirted with the hormonal mysteries before The Course. Who hadn't been bewildered by a racing heart or sweaty palms upon seeing a naked body: a breast, a penis, a movie of adult delights...yet, how little they did know by thirteen as most were totally boggled by the instructed vision and reality as the first weeks of The Course unfurled.

_Insight_ : a sparse interpretation of the fuller vision given to them was grounded in the reality of the spiritual character of sexual intercourse. "Spiritual" meaning "full sexual presence" as it was harbinger of the fuller Galactic Embrace. Not an intellectual concept, nothing ethereal, for what _The Ascendancy_ primarily effected...and was effected by...was the release of human energy into palpable creation. This was a creational _First Story_ as palpable as the enticing flesh of the female or male next to you. ("Creation is _you!_ ")

This practicality was quite attractive... _fascinating_ in its mysterious aspect...to nubile and bone-creaking bodies which were growing in every direction: outward, inward, upward and downward. " _Downward_ is the opposite and contrary of _Ascend_. It will take you your whole life to grasp this," a heavy sigh but one exuding an almost giddy optimism, "but there is a pull downward which defines the pull _upward_." Young Priscilla missed the meaning of this...pubescent Lil did not. _Downward is Bad_.

Lil had reason to pause as this word was mentioned...to remember her first encounter with the downward pull—with "renegade individualism" as her elder Aunt phrased it: "aimless masturbation." " _Girls, are fated, are trained to detect Bad!_ " ...Lil jotted in a corner of her notebook. She would not share this with Priscilla. _Maybe never?_

" _Bitch!_ " he had shouted. "Only animal imagery," she says to no one.

Their practical, erotic focus was to be always not downward but upward—on "The Ascendancy." The Grand Story described a time of cosmic, sidereal change—one altering, expanding, imbuing from quark to atom to molecule to cell to flesh to mind to spirit. Most astoundingly...but accepted almost glibly...it caused an actual relocation of the Earth, itself, in time and space. "A new reality. A new day. Dimension. Axis. What we celebrate on Gathering Day. That we are a People whose bodies and souls are _One_. As we touch one, we touch the other. As we _Play_ so do we Ascend."

A formula from Gathering Day catechism:"We ascended. Each and every individual. We are now a collective people, a communal "I." We are each and everyone Earth-body, planet creators."

Repeated over and over during The Course are the core verities:

"Mother and Father created Male and Female to _Play_."

"To _Play_ and so create the world, the total universe."

"As Mother and Father have created, Played us, so do each of us become gods and goddesses."

"There is life on this world, this Earth, and we are called to be creators of eternal pleasure by Playing on other worlds and filling the universe with the holy flame of erotic _Coupling_."

The grand vision they were given was that of the infiniteness of the cosmos. "The dead planets...they are dead, waiting for you to give them life! For you to _Play_! To become First Male and Female—Parents. _Throb!_ "

"Live Long and Prosper!" carried a coded message and it was to be given to that boy with whom they would eventually _Couple—_ become First Male and First Female. Until that person...How or When or Where he would emerge, neither knew...until that boy could hear the hidden message, that he was her god so she his goddess, until then they were wont to fling themselves wildly into the erotic _Play_ search. Until this secret message was acknowledge by their _Play_ -mate, it was fitting and proper that other girls could share the boy(s) the others had brought tonight!

How eager they became, within this vision, to _Play_ with the boys!

At thirteen, Cilla and Lil were primed, ardent to learn the full breadth and depth of _Play_. With open hearts, curious minds, and feral bodies they swooped down on the first pack of boys each found.

Cilla confided: "I wanted to ask, _Why are the boys Fixed?_ but it seemed... _silly_."

"Someone did ask in my class, and the teacher said, _Don't ask! Tsk!_ Then all of a sudden she burst out laughing— ending with fingers locking lips, tossing the key away, and conjuring a smile none of us then knew as Cheshire."

"You know what we all heard? That boys are going to become females—at _Coupling_. Even so, _if_ they are good at making babies, then they become goddesses. Heard that, too?"

"That, and we have to teach them how to be fathers. They're so wild!"

" _Geesh!_ Me too. I almost asked my Dad once, but thank Our Mother I never did. _Imagine!_ "

"Oh, yeah!"

In The Course the boys were told, "Girls are like green apples. They can be picked, but they need time to ripen before they can be eaten." It was a simple and time-worn simile, but as always, it still needed much pedagogical interpretation.

Exasperated, one teacher Mark remembers, almost shouting, aping the action he spoke so forcibly about, "You need to hoe the ground. _Yikes!_ Are you a thick-head? _Were your parents farmers?_...Hoe the land! _Yikes!_ Your penis is your hoe. Do I need to say more?"

Mark especially liked that image—penis as hoe.

"What was it like?" her inflection left no doubt... _the first time!_

Cilla grimaces. Places her hands aside her temples; lets out a moan.

Lil chuckles, but is also empathetic, deeply feels Cilla's pain.

"Someone told this guy, _Saddle up!_ And I think he forgot to tell him how to dismount!" A deep-bone-crushed groan, shared by both.

"Just how many Sisters have that story! It's amazing."

"It gets worse." She raises a hand to halt Lil's comment. Cilla wants to fully share—empty—this memory.

"He must've flunked The Course...I don't know. But he had this thing about "Getting it five times my first night!" Can you believe that? So, what does he do? He brings along another guy. Know why? They calculated how long it took to "re-load"...I know, _I know_ , but he did really say _that_! Maybe it was the only way he could get himself up, I don't know, but you know how we were trained," Lil duets it silently, " _Do what you must!_ So, it's one on me, then the other, then he's back, then the other...you get it clear. It hurt like hell! I wanted to say, "This is _Play_! And Playtime is over!" But I was too happy, too dumb-broad Greenie happy just to be Playing, and making them happy! _Cripes!_ "

Early on, it soon became clear to both girls that the boys had been taught "things" they hadn't. However, each was a quick learner, a fast study.

Lil—"I'm sure, yeah, looking back, they wanted us to be ready for mothering. Not shy away from _Coupling_. For the unexpected. All the demands on our bodies."

"Possibly." _Unpersuaded_.

"It took a couple of older guys, two on their "Last Games," right before their Twentieth—they helped me figure it out, not that they intended to do so, however, no."

"And...?"

"One was _deeply Bad_. I'm sure of that, now. He was a great lover, at least in foreplay. Smooth. Comforted me. Pleasured me first. _Adored_ me." Sighs wistfully. But the full memory knocks her sober, "What a trickster this guy was! I'm all absolute clay in his hands and he starts talking about pre-Ascendancy sex. I had hardly heard about such, so I wasn't paying much attention. He was getting hot and talking fast about some Dumb Adam's rib and Dumb Adam's cock...then he's right over me, right there with his cock—a nice fat one I must admit!— wagging it at me, so I'm thinking _Suck him_...but what does the bastard do? He masturbates right onto my breasts, splats right onto my right cheek. I was stunned!"...Cilla is perplexed, a bit fascinated..."I mean I would've hand-cranked him or sucked him dry, but it was more than masturbation, there was this look in his eyes, a deep burning, an anger, and I knew he wasn't beating himself— _he was beating me!_ It was horrifying and horrible." Lil had to stop. She always had great difficulty in even remembering what happened next.

Cilla leans over and puts her arms around her; draws her head to her shoulder. Lil sighs deeply, but does not cry.

"He looked at me. Stood there totally naked. Limp penis. Not taller than me. Not threatening, not going to strike me...which I would've not have known what to do, anyway!...just there, I see him, frozen in time and space, and a voice... I didn't see his lips move... a voice rose all around him, like that—"I am the life-giver!" Great Mother, I'll never forget ....!"

It was a strange evening. Cilla could feel it; feel Lil getting strange. But it was, as such, oddly engaging; _warm_.

What could follow that story? Nothing. And nothing did. They had been instructed, prepared to deal with _Bad_ however it might manifest itself—"Do whatever you must!" This command secreting that knowledge primal and sacred—"Special," it was termed...given only to Sisters.

The two...somehow, propelled by what binding force?...got up and went about the day. The hour being dinner, so they went into the kitchen...began breading soy-chops, chopping greens and reds peppers, some carrots, some nuts, composing a hearty spinach salad...then, thawed out some _flash!_ baked potatoes.

They ate.

Lil brewed some coffee—Cilla's favorite: _Viennese_. Cilla cut the chocolate cake she had brought over not too long ago... _Not stale_ , as she sliced.

Evening set, and a time to continue unfolded.

"They never prepared us right—maybe we couldn't be prepared, I'm not sure, but about the boys not wanting to talk...just buck and firk and _Play_ and _Play_ , all hands and tongues and "Round-the-World"...energetic little firkers, aren't they?!" Both laugh...its a shared rippling laughter which takes them deeper.

"But this guy. He wanted to talk. I felt him brimming over with talk. But I knew I didn't want to hear."

"Why'd he leave?"

"Don't know."

"Have you ever seen him, again?"

"No." But said with a hitch of hesitation which makes Cilla also hear a _Yes_.

(3 counts: _dead-beats_.)

Cilla's curiosity is burning her. "You have, _haven't you_."

Lil inhales her question, but exhales nothing but a "Hmmmm."

It's another cup of coffee and another slice of cake.

"Not him. But someone _like_ him."

Cilla waited...but then she knew! _Bad_.

# CHAPTER 8

That what they knew about Life wasn't what Life was about did not concern the four, as it has never deeply concerned adolescents of all time. All they wanted to know was about the next day at the most and the next ten minutes at the best. They were Life... _all juiced!_ Their minds on idle while their hearts and passions were throbbing. "More! _More!_ More!" _Heavy breathing_.

Their teachers...seasoned veterans...knew that their boys and girls were forgetting more than they were being taught. That words, concepts, images...hard and soft, literal and metaphorical, plain and oxymoronic....( _Sigh!)_ "Only time will tell!"—a credo of depthless optimism.

_The Cauldron._ They were immersed in it a three distinct times...leveraging the probability that one would stick and two totally miss. The guys and gals reminisce about how they were first _stirred_.

At Seventeen, Lil: "Twenty-odd. Hard to count, with masks and all the make-up. Not at first even suspecting the _switcheroos_. Not even believing it when I was undressing one! _Blast!_ Triple Blast ...The legendary Erotic Jokester!" ( _What you see is not always what you get!_ )

Cilla: "It was enough just to begin. After all that time in early _Courting_ , getting to where it took some time. Now, back to the flit and the fly-away!"

Lil: " _Exhaustion_. Was that their Game?...It seemed like it. So much craziness! To get to the border of blacking-out. My worst drunk was never like this! _Saints Alive_ _!_ "

Mark was _there..._ entering the room with Zav.

Zav: "She just sat there. In one spot. For hours! Every guy who came in, she painted in gold. Every inch. Chomping on dicks and swallowing them whole! ...I, I stood in line. Can't say...what can't I say? My mind kept echoing the chant: _You are all One. One male. One man. One cock. Each other._ But, but I just wanted to crank it off, by myself, in front of everyone!... _What's not crazy there?"_

Mark hesitates; lets his jaw hold shut. The tale tingled his ears; no longer hesitatn—"Not that I hadn't been with a guy or two on a romp. Me and several girls, too. But... _what was it?_ A type of pleasure I never had? Or never wanted? I was really burned. But when she jacked me and creamed me, I thought my toes were shriveling up and she was sucking me down, deep down inside her!...Guy, let me tell ya, if that wasn't an _ascension_ , I don't know what is." Quiet...humbled...an exhausted ending.

Zav: "The music would stop. _Birds_! Then we were all set upon the birds—pheasants and doves and hugely-crested cockatoos...colors unimaginable! It was quick hit-and-go. "No nesting!"—

_even though, I admit,_ _I wanted to stay_. Never wanted to stay so much! Actually, it all began to piss me off. I think others noticed. All that did was getting them all to push me off quicker!...Shit, was there a conspiracy in there?" Almost an honest question.

Lil: "Never knew when it ended. Just did. Bodies everywhere. The room was hot. Smelly and hot with flowers thickly perfuming everything, almost like a heavy rain. It wasn't until we started showering that I counted."

All together, checking each other out..."Switcheroos?"

Zav smirked. Mark was stolid. Lil blushed. Cilla famously rolled her eyes and stuck out her tongue...everyone shared a loud _tee-hee!_

Lil: "The Second was my best. I _really lost_ it there. Every dick was a great one! I could've stuck one in my ear I was so cock-happy. Maybe it just takes time, but I had never liked just one and certainly not two or three...just too much chatter, too much male boasting. Boys wagging their tongues when their dicks were in dry dock!"

Cilla eyes assert: _Believe me!_ Listened.

"I was into my ass. I mean _deep_. I can't explain it, even now. But I just wanted it in, so damn deep in that it'd come out my mouth. Couldn't shake that image Fraticelli gave us...the cock as tongue!"

"The pictures!" Cilla blurts out, as if stabbed and in agony.

"Goddess, yes, the pictures!" Both girls laugh raucously.

"So?"

"So?"

Each waited for the other.

Cock up my ass.

They had to be drinking for this one. _Solid juice._

"I had a mask. Don't even remember. But the smell! _Gabriel and Moroni,_ why didn't this seem an easy _ascension_?"

Mark laughs, uneasily; shifts the conversation to a serious point.

"You want to _Couple_?" said in that way of recalling how the teacher had prodded them, "You want to _Couple_? Then you have to know...become _fully_ _embraced_."

It was what they knew the Cauldrons were supposed to be, to effect. _Total Pleasure_. What the boys called "The Max" and the girls, "The Wow!"

"If I didn't know I'd have _my way_ the third time...guy, I tell ya, I almost flipped out."

" _Shipped off to Africa?!_ "

Both guys laugh, uneasily, with excess relief...that wanting to die laughter.

All in all, thought Mark, I'd take "69" as The Max, any day. Not sharing this with Zav— _Why?_ The only time he didn't feel like making Cilla feel pain had been when he almost told her, "You're my Smoky Angel!" But he didn't then. Pain was The Max he'd give her.

"I love to lick clits," as if reading his mind!

"Okay. Don't ask me to go on! _Asshole_. But I want you to know the switcheroo is _Bad_. I believe that." _I don't care what my Dad said._

"You missed the whole _Mother-Father_ awful point!" Mark was almost glee drunk.

Yeah?

"We've gotta select one. We gotta be selected. You gotta be Many before you're One. Not the other way round." He ended with unexpressed smugness.

(Popular rendition of Rule 13: "Being One is its own switcheroo!")

"I'm there. I feel them."

"Not understand?" Cautious, investigating.

"Never!" Whispered conspiratorially.

"Live Long and Prosper!" they burst out in wicked delight.

"It's just that _downward_ thing, guy, don't let it get to you. They say it has to be there. So we can go upward. Okay? You _Okay?_ "

Mark heard, but couldn't move. _Catatonic_. But no self adjectives.

Zav is alone, in that Mark is snoring badly and baldly, broadcasting from his locked door bedroom.

"What is, is not," the words stream through his head..like the back-stroke. _Is it all switcheroo?_

That's all he really thought he knew. About himself. About the world. About all this— _Courting_ and The Game and The Cauldron and what was to come... _Coupling_. Especially, the girls. _They feel they're ready_. This he could sense. _But ready for what?_

Is he ready?

Am I ready?

Is any guy ever ready to Couple? _Bad._

# CHAPTER 9

_Boys are so easy to please_. She stopped herself from vocalizing it. Let it smack around her internal dialogue with a smirk—"You were pretty easy to please, yourself, dingbat!" _Ah!_ _how philosophical you've become, dear one, as the years have passed._ Lil rolls over to her other side...suffocates herself with a pillow, and as all darkens the "Tales of Luscious Lil" bursts from spotlight amidst clapping and howling and hooting...a collective lung and lustful heart—"Good evening, _boys!_ "

She had liked that, and she had let them know: _luscious_. It came on the tongue of some really odd character, an older boy, maybe almost nineteen...she never asked, he never told...odd in that he preferred to watch..not an artist or anything like that...just watch from behind a door, peeking through a crack, usually a closet door, peering as the others have her or she them—however he'd see it in his mind's eye. At the end of her Play he'd step out into the bedroom, not come right up to her, no, kept the same three steps from her as was his peculiar way...but all the time probing her, scanning her every part. "It spooked me at first. I wanted to give him something. Stroke him. _Do_ something!" _Peering_...it came to her—"What, two years later? Dumb me!"—came to her that he was giving to her what no other boy had. _What?_..."His _total_ attention. Complete _worship!_ "

Only Cilla had ever asked, "Why'd he stop?"

Lil grimaced a slight incomprehensibility.

But you do know, don't you? Why couldn't you say this to Cilla? That he left once you received his full attention.

He was the only boy Lil had not found so easy to please.

"Luscious Lil!"...Iit was pure clamor: shouts, whistles, animal groans, grunts, feet-stomping... _All he had said...you know this was when you first "Got it!"— Great Mother how green you were!—"Luscious Lil" ...the rest didn't even know what they were getting so worked up about._

The darkness is so interior that her inner moon shines. _Luscious Lil_ , she whispers to herself as she submits to this state of being, surrenders her every sense of self to this lusciousness, obliterates her Lil for this _Luscious_...off-stage laughter of her now-self, watching this Greenie ripen!...watching her imagine herself as the stream, as a clear, sun-glinting, fast-flowing stream beset by a necklace of trees, all in full leafage, stones sparkling as the water polishes them, reflecting excitement, and it is her arms...hands, fingers...which flow, which whirl about and above her like flights of bantam birds, this enchanting them—they the fishermen: _worm-boys_ amuses her...there at her banks as she flits and flirts around the stage... _oh!_ they start wildly to fling their lines, cast forth their baits upon her waters, she unbinding her breasts, flinging blouse: fully wrapped in fiery red...flinging it as the sun is flung through cloud burst and sunder...not a noise except the swelling gasp of single-voiced boys—as one, they with tongues in staccato shouts of praise towards the heavens which she has become their full blue sky as the softness of her body, the slender spread of her maiden belly, the entrancing flight of her taut thighs.. _Luscious Lil!_

She rolls over and over right to the edge, back over and over, pillow screwing her head.

"Those first years," Cilla, are you listening?..."I really wanted only _one_ boy. Ya know, wanted like in what I thought _Coupling_ want is...it was that _watcher_. Can you believe it, I've never seen him again?"

"Not even in a Tag or a Cauldron?"

"Think I wouldn't know?" Almost irritated, edged with anger, quickly modulating it to be a simple question—the anger and irritation caught only by herself..."Think I wouldn't know?"

_Luscious_. What would Mom have said? Mom, with all the love a mom could, I guess. "Your body is like a feast. Boys, let me say, I think, so many call them _wild_ but it's just their nature. That's why there's the Rules and protocols. Don't worry, dear, The Course will prepare them." _Ha!_ I'm only luscious because I let them do everything, just _everything_.

She's musing with the insight being-green aptly mis-describes what _Everything!_ actually forebodes. Hearing _Everything!_ as her answer. Watching its impact as answer. As if the word slit the boy from head to toe...so totally rent him apart that he was incapacitated like a corpse. ( _Chuckle!_ ) More, relentless...she wouldn't let him go, not until he said it to her, said, _Everything! You're everything I ever wanted...you're luscious!—_ which normally was uttered in a moment of wipe-out fatigue, quite often with a downward exhale of defeat. Victory was hers!..." _I can't!_ "—meaning can't move, can't handle another blow-job, can't even want not to!

_He_ had said it, "Luscious," and somehow from that moment every boy knew.

"Maybe _everything_ was really what he couldn't say? Didn't know could say?" A harsh thought which wakens her from her semi-dreaming roll and tale-spin. She lifts the pillow off her face, in a single motion, flips it onto the floor...won't say it to herself but it is said behind the house, in the sandbox...leaning over towards her..."Luscious _is_ Everything!"

She wants to unwrap herself. _Am I Luscious inside?_ Cups her breasts: moons, white stones, snow-balls, she hears the endless echoes but also endlessly repetitious imagery of boys: _Milk Maid!_ Did they all fail the section on "Creative Imagery"? Turning a twist, watching herself flow upon the glass as she has so often flowed across the stage: small stage, larger stage, a solo performance—wherever she danced, she rippled more than moved, this what Lil loves about the dance, has come to find herself in the dance, at least now she so knows.... _dancing_ , I am image, I am the opening, they are there like locks or knobless doors or a sky thickly overcast and darkly, _ah!_ they melt...she watches their mouths open, some ever so slightly, just a slit, others like large caves which can be seen from a great distance...watching herself watch them as she leaps and prances about, knowing that she is deer, gazelle—sensing that she is also target and capture!—it all comes so she sees herself accepting them, receiving these images of herself ..."More them than me"...now insight into her role as receiver—allowing her skin to be their parchment, their scroll...at first, it was only the cock as pen, inscribing her, transforming her into message, leaving her their tales of desire, yearnings, of wanting to be One... _Ah!_ she had needed _so_ many pen-men! so many scribes! there was a giddy excitement about all those penile salutes! .... _Yes_ _! how worshipped you felt! Were._

So had she listened to them all. Private tales. Buddy tales. Team tales. _Boy tales_. Tales of how she was all that each had ever wanted! Tales of how lost they were without her! Tales of how totally happy she made them! _Tales, which in five minutes you're blathering to one of my Sisters!_ But she knows only this as later insight. _You believed them all...how Green were you?_

Turning full turn, positioning a hand-mirror to catch the fall of her hair upon her back, the arousal of her ass as pivot, she flexes and tenses her legs...if nothing else, her ass always choked them, got them to spit out "Luscious" whether in words or eye-yelp, but it was her cunny which she carried as "Luscious," stroking it gently and thrilling at its power over them...hyptnotic... _if nothing else, those Green years were wonderful discovery!_

Here now, enters Zav. _How many performances did he catch? By himself? On a team? In a Cauldron?_ "Why haven't you ever asked?" she speaks out loud to herself. Silently she hears what her words want to cloak— _Why did he never tell a tale of Luscious?_

It was not a word he ever offered her. _He must've known?_ Everyone knew!

_Bastard!_ she screams at him, throwing the hand-mirror at him, fired by rage, having herself swamped by a down feeling she has never felt so deeply...he, there, after hours of great firking, playing in delights and every desire, _my doing everything for him! he, doing everything I ask!..._ a rage which folds her eyes inward and locks them—she _sees_ herself spitting at him, corrosive spit, acidic...him writhing, burning up in front of her, total flesh sizzle...weeping sores and trickling spouts of ghastly acrid smoke: _fuming_. All of a sudden, her eyes pop open— _Whop!..._ Inwardly she gasps, for she has never been so imaginatively _down—_ _Who are you?_ ... _Zav, you b_ _astard!_ ...asks again, but soundlessly in question and response...she sees it all re-run again—his half-sitting recline...was it a smug posture to evoke a smugtone? " _Not everything_ ," he replies.

( _yourenoteverythingtome!_ )

It was the first time Lil thought— _Bad?_

_Maybe it was that which made me not-Green, anymore?_ She didn't like the sound of this, even if it were true. "It hurts, doesn't it?" But it was more like an ache. "Love-making can hurt," one of the first cautions from her Mom, "Boys are just stronger. They get _so excited_." She was only ten at the time, so she didn't want to tap into her mother's excitement.

_Hurt._ Maybe, there's something there? _Great Moroni's Toot!_

_There was_ something linking the watcher with Zav...Lil rolls up, half-off, sitting; bends, picks up the pillow, stands and with clear intention and attention artfully returns the bed to the visual pleasure it was meant to be...her daily tidying-up preparation at the start of a day.

"Not everything." _Great Mother,_ _What did he know?_...Okay. _Okay!_ You gotta admit, this is why you invited him to _Couple_.

# CHAPTER 10

"Do you think _Coupling_ 's all it's cracked up to be?"

"Have they ever not been right?" Inside himself: _How could you even ask that question?_

"You mean," he hesitates...this is new ground..."you're totally satisfied with Cilla?"

A look of _Who is this guy?_ bordering on _stupid?_ and _have I misjudged him?_

Zav notes the far-away look. Gets up and goes to his room.

"Are you?"

"What?" _Again?_

"Totally satisfied?"

"It totals up. That good enough for you?"

"Sure." _Surely not!_

Mark was pretty predictable but _who else is there?_ When they had Tagged...not with these two...he had been pretty formulaic. Had his rush of seductive babble. Knew how to flatter...actually, _he's top-grade there!_ Zav almost didn't have to utter a word. Mark mesmerized all the girls. He kept them, how was it... _what?_ "Off-balance" the only phrase which came to mind.

"Your hair is so lustrous—it's so _magical_!" He touches just the hem of her hairline. Snags one strand. "Pure amber...the blessing of the Goddess!" _Sighs_. "Are you the Enchantress dancing round my Pillar?" Festive tease. Zav didn't know how or why it worked because "If I said that, dead fish!"...but there was something Mark had that moved the girls, this girl to pledge, "May _all_ the Goddess' blessings be yours!"...and without any hesitation she'd flock her hair and slip through time and space to be kneeling before him or him on the bed and she between his legs—no kidding about it, Zav was amazed... _Respectful!_ Here was a guy who knew how to "please one, get one" like no one else he knew. _Hmmm._ Not only respectful, but _grateful!_....because he was the immediate beneficiary of Mark's skills... _she_ never complaining when he mounted her as she picnicked with Mark!

But it stopped, somewhat abruptly, right about there. _Talk—Play—End_. Something quite unsatisfying for Zav, so it made sense for him to ask, "Totally satisfying?" He had never encountered Cilla before he met Lil. Certain that he hadn't. For some reason, that made dealing with Cilla palatable. He was relieved that she didn't look at him even with a _Say, weren't you in line at...?_ type of look which most guys didn't know how to handle, confessing more in boast than fact, _Sure, babe, it was me_ , even if not, because, anyways, no one was suppose to _try_ and remember, though forgetting everyone was even more difficult.

Zav relished re-playing with memories of several he had never seen but once, so neither he nor Cilla seemed to have even the remotest sense of a connection...it was like how he thought Mark thinks, that _Lil's what Cilla's not..._ at least I think so." _At least you hope so, guy, admit that to yourself!_ ".. _Cow-bung!_ He liked Mark, it was a curious attraction he recognizes— _What does Mark find in me?_ Not sure that Mark ever asks himself that question!...Okay! _Okay._..You don't like... _really don't!..._ how he does it. That's what bugs you about Cilla. How can she put up with him? You want to be positive about his seductive skills, but— _Toot! Toot!—_ he's like all the others, with a fast in and out...just being ridden by his cock, not riding it— _I've always hated_ _that!_...So, why would she be any different from the ones you Tagged together? _Do you want her to be different?_

"When did it begin to get you down?" _Why didn't anyone ask me that?_

Asking myself. Am I alone in this universe? Sure, I question it all. _All!_ Why? Because it happened. Three months into it and I began not to care. To say, _He's got her, so I've got her, right?_ Isn't that passing the final test? Becoming these other guys? But, suppose I said, "Teacher, how do I know these other guys have become me?"

cow-bung!cow-bungcowbungbungbung!

"I feel _Bad_." Zav says this out loud to himself. Suppose I say that to others? What would it mean? But it's a good word. "I'm so down I'm _Bad_." Better keep that to myself.

Mark: "Let's get straight, Cilla _is_ totally satisfying. Come at it this way. She's done it all. So she's told me. Filled in every box. So there's nothing I can't do. Isn't that the total sum and balance? What The Course is all about?"

"Have you done it all?"

"What's not done?"

Clyde was his name. Told me about the watching. Told me how to watch. Never took me out on point, but was vividly descriptive. Would describe the intricate lay of her pubic hairs! Had five adjectives for the softness of hair...at least for the hair he liked. " _Every sense_ ," is how he described it, "Catch this...when you're doing it, like hot and heavy pounding the sheets, when your cock's so hard your brain's splitting...you can't get in every sense, _simply cannot_. You need more women. Several a night. Sometimes in a row. You have to _remember_ if you're just fucking...but the eyes, they suck in, they're like a girl's pussy... _believe me!_ girls see you, don't you get it? ...that's why they spout that babble about "Whatever you want!" and coo, "I'll give you _everything!_ "... _Crap!_ Just mounds of elephant feces, _Ha! Ha!..._ They see you, all of you—don't drop the ball on this insight!—" _The_ ball?!"...Catch this...you see and you remember, you see and you fantasize, you see and you are _there..._ it may be Tom's dick or Harry's cock but it's you like you've never been there—each cunny is every cunny, each lickable boob is every boob you've ever drooled over and sifted through your suckling fingers... _Look!_ get it? Look and your cock's not blind anymore! _Ha! Ha!"_

"What's there about Cilla?"

For the first time, Mark realized that Zav had never had Cilla!

"What's not there?" Passing it off with a slight chuckle, an eye-turn towards the _Flicker_.

"No, guy, I mean this. C'mon." Almost pleading. _Pathetic_.

"She never tells Lil _everything_."

Zav waits for another sentence. Doesn't come.

Mark can almost see him waiting. Eyes him on the periphery. Two guys sitting kitty-corner watching mega-ball.

"Great game, eh?!"

Mark knows something Zav doesn't. Smug within—"You're Twenty, sure, but you'll always be _Green!_ " It was, back-then, at this very exact moment when he fixated on _mastering_ Lil. _Imbalance_. "War of the Sexes!" It was what he felt, not what he thought...It is what he desires as he leaves the room, having played Zav like the fool he is!

# CHAPTER 11

The _Third Cauldron_ was everything the previous _Cauldrons_ and previous years were not.

As much as the first _Fixed_ years and the _First Cauldron_ were a release, a plunge, a delving into, an exploration of ..."Explosion!" is how Cilla phrased it, but only to other girls...an explosion of _S-E-X!—_ sexual imagining...they were to imagine themselves _sexy_...and all imaginings were acceptable, good, not to be refused, so, as much as the _First_ was the Entrance into something they had never experienced so was the _Third_ not just an Exit but another Entrance—but one (unknown to all) which might not be found!

" _Third_ time is a charm," was an ancient maxim which had a peculiar twist, for it could be anything but charming.

But it was _charm_ which had to be or be found or be that which found you. As the other two were _Cauldrons_ where others explored you as much as you did them, so this _Third_ was where you explored yourself. It was interior, inward, internal..."Am I charming?"

The question was personal. Direct. Singular. The sounds from _just one other_ would be the _only_ affirmation—that _Yes_ so tremblingly desired. _Just one other; only._

In the _First_ , there were hardly questions and answers. Hardly any requests. All seemed to flash along, burst out, flare up like firework fuses...just a strike, a match's flame and your world was changed— _Floosh!_ body, mind and soul!

A boy didn't have to speak to the others. It was just their glances. And to each girl they were all adoring. Clawing. Clutching. Sometimes a press too hard: a bruise. But, all in all, _adoring_.

One was adored...as Lilith and Cilla had been...simply because she was a female: _scent_. No girl stalled a moment to think the thought of _Why?_ Why think any thought which would cause one to pause? For there was hardly a moment between embraces. Nary seconds between waves of lustful heat. The sweat of desire sprinkled them, drew their young, aching bodies closer—was that perfume strange to rutting heat and passion. The more each firked, the more all firked...the more frenzied, the more frenetic, the more orgasmic, the more absolutely totally and completely calm did each and everyone become.

It was an ordering and orderliness only the teachers anticipated—a progression as well as procession...a fact they did _not_ share with their charges.

It was, simply, _Cauldron_. One of a most youthful, boisterous and boastful energy which when mingled, stirred, cooked generates and creates something new— _presence_.

_Oh_ , there were words! Shouts. Vigorous screeches. Lashing screams. Thrashing gutturals and half-formed sounds and twice-uttered ejaculations and tongue-twisting blasts, snorts, howls, and groans. Sounds endless.

Yet, a placidity. A silence. At times a collective catching-of-the-breath...a taut mutedness. It was an awareness of, the acceptance of, a stunned reverence towards something uniquely forged, produced, evolved...it was a moment beyond itself— _birthing_.

For the _First_ was riveted by punctuated _ascensions_. "Communal Epiphanies," again, a teacher's words, shared not with the students.

This is what the _First_ delivered—the imagining of a novel sexual presence wherein it was grasped that "My cock is your cock." "Your cunny is my cunny."

Cilla wanted the line to be long... _long-long_. For the cumulative heat to melt the walls, set afire the curtains. She collected the differences. The looks of wonder, of abandonment, of hesitation...from those which marveled at the sight of her breasts, those who clamped shut with the pulsating squeeze of her cunny—especially, the ones which were bright-eyed, almost weepy at the instant of post-climax, with orbs celestial, dying yet in their flame-out, expressing, offering up, setting free hymns of gratitude, odes of thanks-giving, skips and hops of joy!

_Ah!_ She is pleasantly remembering.

Zav had come armed with the special gift of his poetic heart. This is how he saw himself. Each boy did see himself differently. If each had to issue a statement, write a letter, or in any way verbally offer his seduction, he would have found words, however brusque, however stumbling, to declare, "I am different," and so imply, "Embrace me!"

_Poetic heart._ It was his phrase, "Has any other said likewise?" Not in his high school, not in any classes until college...and here, only one other who seemed to have the same sense Zav did, that it meant that he felt in a way others did not. That when they said, "This is this." That he knew, "This is that." As in, "This is a cup." But he knowing it as, "This is half. Emptiness. That which is missing." _Poet_...was how he had come to grasp what his parents had...so he, with guileless innocence, had known at once, and now knows ever-increasingly to be true...what they had so badly misunderstood about _Bad_. Exactly, they had not, did not ("Could not"?) understand "intention" and "consequence" as he...mere boy that he still was...as he thought they had.

Unfortunately, the other self-styled "poet" in his class proved to be like his parents. Zav quickly distanced himself.

_Intention_ and _consequence_ he saw not like words but as images, like the image of the cup.

During his _First Cauldron_ , all was cup.

Even before he entered the room... _that room—_ which no boy could forget, would forget, but the description of which varied so widely from boy to boy that Zav often wondered if they had actually been in the same room...but this, he told himself upon the day of insight into _poetic heart_ , was before he grasped the generating, artful power of collective imagining—that room where all the boys and girls met, totally naked: _peeled_. Thirty, if there had been a count. How hard his dick shot out was lost upon his mind because it had become his mind.

Within the last echo of the fourth strike on the sonorous bronze gong, all had begun. First, the dance—girls donning full-length gossamer robes dewed with specks of silvery pearl... _shimmering_ , being water-falling upon smooth marble, so the girls danced enchantedly—enchanting, evoking, summoning...boys with simple azure stoles looped around their necks...becoming sky and clouds to the falling rain...a prancing and looping that was practiced during The Course—back then it was boys alone, girls alone...each step memorized, but here turning into what none could have foreseen, yet what each so achingly yearned for...a gracefulness of individuals who, dancing, become group and at the moment of grouping, disperse into communal imaginings.

Some quickly to the masks. Others whirling about under splendid capes—each having to be personally made, not borrowed, not bought—creating swirling themes of showers of flowers and bright, daring bolts of colored forms...globular was the dominant manifestation..but as to all this only the teachers took notes, jotted in their Observation Books.

Zav had selected a tie. Wide as his hand but as long as to cover his private parts...it was a serpent, poised, regal, ready not to strike but to draw attention, to fascinate—he chuckles as he puts it on...and it was the first responding chuckle which drew him over. She a shiny goddess all possessed by writhing streamlets of color painted upon her body, front and back: _Alive!_ Pulsating. Seething! ...Darting eyes, these which were her beckoners, a mouth small and somewhat squished but which worked a tongue in coy tango, lassoing him with kisses...she wafts him towards her...hidden there her forked-tongue enthralla him, never giving him a moment to consider that she is now his first, not being his first embrace, but his first Grand Goddess, first Lover...so it was his to be, for the first time, a Grand God and a first Lover—meaning not Zav any longer, not a cock tied to a morsel of identifiable flesh, but a living, panting, growling, prowling, feverish-a-fire and mad imagining of sexual desire...in truth as in myth, he a First Male, she a First Female.

Lil: Did not know him.

Zav: Did not know her.

Jots in an Observation Booklet.

There was not space for all, so _t_ _hat room_ lost its anchor, its locus, its bearing...and to conjure the magic of imagining there were other rooms, innumerable, as there was time infinite.

Sometimes just four, never less.

Sometimes four and then four more.

Sometimes no way to count—as the goal of all their teaching, all that stirred in the Cauldron, came to a wondrous fruition...all feeling simply as One—being not solitary but the One who is All.

_Communal_.

_Cauldron_ —so aptly named, for they were melted down, refined, absorbed, purified, combined, brewed.

Not that there weren't moments of un-imagining. As when raw vegetables are thrown into the pot, before they become stew.

Boys jostle boys.

Girls steal from girls.

There are grunts which threaten.

There are hisses which seek to claw.

But it doesn't take long for imagining to effect the _ascension_.

Zav mounts the moon...accepts the invitation of the departing Lover and docks himself inside her. Presses hard, reflexively pumps in and out, slowly, finding as he does so that he has found _him—_ the other who has just left, the many others who had been...it's like walking down a corridor observing niches with artful statues, so is he being imagined, not he imagining—this the communal epiphany, this the _ascension_.

Yet, so new at the _First_ that he is unaware, has it not rise into a solid thought, only feels it, senses it as he swims into her, for it is this motion which overwhelms him... now, he swimming, not pumping, not shooting, not propelling from within him to outside and within her, not depositing...swimming—flowing as if a wave, a wave among waves, a wave coming more strongly to swelling wave, cresting wave, thundering orgasmic wave as she is beach, standing there as cloud waving from the beach, not at all a person, not he a person— _More!_ —both as a _presence..._ it is this swimming into presence—fully of her, fully of him—which is the _ascension_.

Between the _First_ and the _Second_ there was only a difference of intensity, not of kind. Each became more fluid, sharp, talented. " _Flow_. How do you flow?" which meant, How are you handling being _here_ and being _there_ , at the same time? Not so philosophically worded, more, as vaguely posed. Most answers were curt: "Good," "Okay," "Wavy!"

None except Zav...and he does believe that there are others: _senses_ them...yet none who handle it in its true philosophical depth. But then, he is only soliloquizing.

The _Third_ was no earlier than the eighteenth year. The _Second_ just happened, without a precise accounting.

It was a time for technique as much as anything.

Athleticism abounded.

Artful displays consumed more time.

"A hundred ways for exciting...." fill in the blanks: fellatio, cunnilingus, bung-holing, nipple orgasm, finger-firking...it went on and on.

There was also some smugness about _being ascended_. Which required a refresher course or two to ensure that their charges did not stray too far from the necessary preparation for the _Third_.

"I'll do it. But it's crap!" _Angry_.

"You did the other things they told us. Was that crap?" A hint of exasperation.

"Yeah, okay..." as Mark slips on her brassiere, does so but can't bend his arms around his back to fasten it.

She titters; almost tears. He is instantly pissed.

Before he can spit—"Here," she pulls the contraption (how Mark is describing it to himself) around and snaps it on backwards and then swirls it around, through his hairy armpits, "Voila!"

Firk!

"A little flat-chested..." but she can't finish.

Mark grabs a skirt and stomps out of the bedroom.

Lil liked to dress up like her Dad when she was young. Even favored the male fashions into her teens, but she never made much of it to the others.

"Men's clothes are so comfortable." Fully dressed. Casual style. Slacks. A jersey. Sockless loafers.

Zav had never even once ever thought about his Mother's closet!

"C'mon here, Sweetie!" With a snap of the fingers, a whip of the wrist, and a nod of the head. He saunters over. "Get into this!"

Switcheroo!

"How many times do we have to do this?"

"Anyone know the date?"

Voice from a stall, "Two months." Said in that tone of "Two freaking stupid blasted months to go!"

Since they had trusted their teachers, especially the Master Teacher up to this point, who were they to complain or not comply?

Hadn't each enjoyed all The Games and the two _Cauldrons_?

Who had found a _Rule_ they really didn't like?

"I'll do it their way as long as I can also do it my way!"...Mark's way of handling it.

When The _Third_ came to be, each and all were surprised.

The boys in one room. The girls in another. At least this is what each group initially supposes.

Plainly dressed. Bland and uniform khaki. No style. No flare.

Each walks up to a microphone. Each responds to the same question.

"Who are you?"

Most cover as much ground as possible. Nervous that they are forgetting, missing that something which makes them special: _charming_. Caught off guard by the invisibility of their teachers. Add, the invisibility of the other gender, although each word is heard as each speaker is seen beyond the blind. _Isolated. Individual. Personal._ Not in the least comforted by the proximity of their own gender group—sitting in a straight row of folding chairs behind the one speaking.

"I am..." and it fades off into the dullness of idiosyncrasies and solitary pursuits.

"I am..." bounces and clunks as it reaches deep into the realm of each one's separteness, aloneness, isolatedness...harder to discuss or describe once having felt the collective "I"...the feeling of _ascension_ , of being communal...which, here, in this exercise finds no delightful tongue.

Droning on; endlesslisting—"... playing Monopoly. Studying exobiological genetics. Building models of ancient gasoline cars." Individual. Specific. Dull. _Dull_. Dull.

Zav and Mark, Cilla and Lil—all fare as badly as their peers.

"Torture! Pure torture," Zav—not about his speech but on having to have listened to all the other speeches...of boys and girls.

The other three grimaced sympathetically.

(" _Charmed?_ ")

Zav had snuck in just one cleverness—"I am who I am _not_." Glossed that with a quick rendition of the books he liked to read: "Archetypal Martian fables. Nephite archaeology. Flick-clips on Proto-Classical _Thump and Wail_..." and such.

A note was jotted in an Observation Booklet: _Poet_.

Another: _Bad?_

"Fluked, guy, I tell you, simply fluked."

Mark had nothing to add.

"We've still some Game time. How about picking up some _Last Games_ Greenies?"

Both snicker, then toss down a thumb of hot sweating alky.

"Yeah. I'm pumping it, but it ain't the same. _You?_ "

"Haven't seen Cilla in days. Make that weeks."

"Yeah, know what you mean. No firking!"

Firk!

Mark heard Zav out, was not surprised that he put him off, expecting him to understand since, like many others, now he was practicing _self time_. What some called this last three month period before their Twentieth. A time when they could ignore a glance, a come-hither, a dip of a bared shoulder...which the Greenies and youngers were supposed to understand but which most didn't, especially the Greenies. However, few self-timers cared because there was so much juice flowing that, if they wanted, and when they wanted, it took but just another slight turn, another mere glance and they were off: _Courting_.

_Self-time._ "Who am I?" really knocked Zav about. _I am who I am not._

Mark had said, "I'm me. Wonderful me. What you see is what you get!" Self-satisfyingly jointing it: "What you don't see is what you don't get!" _Balance_. It made him happy. It seemed to satisfy Cilla. Charmed her—his self-confidence, self-assuredness...even though her "Smoky Angel?" still unanswered, yet all rolling up into an thrilling charmfulness. She said, "You're charming," before he charmed her with, "Likewise."

Without sound: Column A: "Not Charming." Column B: "Charming." Mark is in control!

Poetic beyond his own grasp, Zav had avoided sharing his musing on the question with Lil.

Yet, Zav had no doubts. "Lilith" would be the name on the Invitation. _He had no doubts._

_Haven't seen Cilla in days. Make that weeks._ The words raced through his whole body from toes to groin pounding up to heart and blasting into his brain. If his eyes could jiggle like slot-machines he would have wished them to so jiggle.

"Not Cilla. _Lilith_." Oh, how he had wanted to say that. Utter it in calm, cold, iron words. Words staked like Father-God Armstrong stabbing the moon with his flag-spear.

To Cilla. To Zav. "Especially to Zav!"

She couldn't refuse him. There was no thought of refusing. Regardless of how the _Third_ had changed things. _He must've been there, before?!_

Regardless of how the answer to Zav's "Who are you?" was now confirmed as "Lilith." Regardless of how all knew that they needed to practice anew, practice "self time" and practice answering "Who am I?" by focusing upon, meditating with, and clarifying the uniqueness of the one with whom they would _Couple_.

They were not yet Twenty. All was still allowed.

_More, it had to be. "Fate, once-again!"..._ unwhispered _._

"No Rule broken!" ("Letter of the Law" in Column A. "Spirit of the Law" in Column B.)

(" _Bullshit!_ ")

"Flow." Not a question. Not even a command. Just said to her as if lifting a slice of apple for her, _Eat!_

He didn't seek Zav in her.

He didn't explore with artful hands.

He didn't swim, not imagining her as beach.

He didn't seduce her, not a romantic whisper or gift.

" _Nothing_!"

Nothing she could do.

Too startled to feign pleasure at his coming.

He pushed himself into her.

He pushed her around on the floor.

He pressed himself as harshly as his might endowed.

He pressed and pushed himself into every entrance, came out every exit.

He squashed and mashed and squeezed and balled her up into his hands—pounded her round and threw her away!

("Live Long and Prosper!" thrills his every quark...conscious and unconscious.)

Lilith weeps.

Flesh sodden with his sweat—sweat of _his_ flesh, thick spit of _his_ seed, the sucking of _his_ soul...sweating— she hears his resounding naming, his naming of her self..." _You are nothing! Nothing!_ "

As _shame_ was a word long forgotten—of the Dumb Faith—all she felt she could only describe as _Bad..._ the Downward pull. _Real Bad!_

("Am I?"...Zav? Cilla? ... _Am I?_ )

As trained, so she voiced the only answer anyone could proffer—"Do whatever you must!"

(" _No_. Cilla, you are wrong! I do remember _him!_ ")

There are no jots about all this in any Observation Booklet.

# PART 2: COUPLING
# CHAPTER 12

The guys celebrated their Twentieth with a vigorous hand-shake, a mile-wide grin, a thumping brotherly hug, and a staccato chorus of "Zowie!"s. It was as Mark would have designed their companionship, if he could have put it on a spreadsheet—Mark and Zav as offsetting, balancing columns of solid data, making for a profitable bottom-line. But they didn't talk about it that way. Simply went about, " _Twenty!_ _Twenty!_ "

Being _Twenty_ meant getting unFixed. In itself, a nervous expectation. For it meant more than "Turning the spigot back on!" Quite a bit more...by the time they had passed seventeen, a subtle re-direction in their sexual Play was being fully effected by their counselors. Those adults who "Are always here _for you_. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Remember that." Adults-as-intruders, so tagged once introduced at the beginning of The Course but eagerly sought as advisers as sessions of "Advanced _Courting_ " unfolded.

At nineteen the counselors became ever more daily present. They were addressed as "Elder So-and-So"...old enough to have an _empty nest..._ all their kids out and about. These Elders would show up at a bar, a party, after a lecture, sometimes even as initiating contact with a quite thinly-veiled excuse for intruding—"a cousin-on-your-Mother's-Aunt's-Grandfather's-side"— _weird_. Conversations would begin without Mark or Zav even knowing that they were beginning.

The fact that Zav had a counselor led Mark to conclude that he wasn't "really that _Bad_." Truth is, that didn't seem an issue, not for quite sometime. But he did log a memo.

The subtlest but most consistent change was in the new imaginings opened by imagery and language. Of _her_. Incrementally shifting from the ever eagerly awaited unveiling of new techniques for pleasure...gobbled hastily and put into practice _immediately!_ by those _Courting—_ shifting from the childhood years of narrow-sight of _I am me!_ into broader sight of _I am we!..._ shifting now back to narrow-sight but one which could only come from the broader-sight border, of "One is one!" Meaning, that one was to become this other, this girl—to create an unsettling spiritual egoism which was Two-as-One while enabling each to be solely one—the creative challenge of evoking _Presence_.

"Tough stuff," all nodded, counselors and students, " _Coupling_ relationships are tough stuff."

" _What you did was more for her than you_." This in explaining why boys got Fixed.

"Elder Jansen, girls were ours for the taking. Did I miss something?" A riff of hardly suppressed sniggering and bawdy guffaws slaps the room.

"Listen." Stern. Authoritative. "Girls who now become wives. _Your_ _wife_. They will know only one man— _you_. They will know only the sexual delights you deliver, you bring as gifts. You are all they need be, must be, now. You sow the seed, they reap the harvest."

The Elder was so serious and so very grave that no one seemed even to be breathing.

A monotone voice, almost ventriloquism—"What have we sown?"

Therein laid the first turning for Zav. Everything which seemed to have been...just wasn't what it was supposed to be. A girl having five boys or five-hundred. A girl having sex in every conceivable position and contortion. Girls as being the ones whom the boys _served_ " _It just wasn't so!_

His mind wanders back to so many of the same situations. "Come here, _boy!_ " Firm, commanding, authoritative... in that special way certain, especially older, girls were. Meaning, _she knew_ that he was ready to do whatever she wanted. But her invitation was all really coquettish, a cooing cover for what she didn't say but meant, "What's your pleasure?"...she making him _know_ that he was there because _she_ wanted him, and that, when spent, she could call another...even before he was out of the room... _Aaarrrggghhhh!_ to linger would have been humiliating—for the freedom each boy bestowed was his lack of pride of ownership, that's what The Course taught.

" _What you did was more for her than you_." Was the Elder a poet?

"You're a hoe. Rake the ground. Seed the furrow." Mark understood.

_Perplexed_ —what was the Elder trying to say? "Or saying that I can't grasp?"

"Girls have the _power_." Every boy knew it meant _to have babies_. They were "loaded," meaning with eggs. When Mark thought Zav _loaded_ it was only with " _Bad_ seed," meaning teenager mothers...a great offense, a grievous sin, a social abomination. ("Mom, is that what you were trying to tell me?")

Teenage mothers—none has Zav ever known or known anyone who has known, but he had known that older guys—married and widowed—did come and take a girl...even a Greenie...now and then. It was not from their boasting—not from these men, but a taunt from a girl, but a taunting barb, "You're still such a _weenie Greenie_!" It happened to Zav only once. Mark never came close to the subject.

_Why was this permitted?_ Such a question marked Zav a poet.

("Mom, is that what you were trying to tell me?")

"Girl power!" a phrase when tossed about by the boys ...a macho, posturing phrase. Sometimes hards would pop out and be displayed as it was shouted, especially in mega-ball bars.

"Girl power!" when now thrown about by the girls was a flush of breast-swelling, cunny dripping lust...words of fire which made each feel good, feel strong, feel eternally alive...a phrase that stroked the waiting womb....wakened an echo.

Zav was prepared to press his counselor, Elder Samuleson, "If I'm to _keep_ her pregnant—pop one, seed another...I've thought about this— _What am I to do when she can't?_ "

"Ah, inevitably! _The Twenties' Question_. Actually, you're ahead of yourself, here, son. Most don't start stumbling over this till about twenty-six. Some, _never_...How shall I phrase this?"

"Clearly, I hope."

He strokes his short goatee, half-smiles, paused for an oracular inflection, "Nothing _truly spiritual_ is clear."

A minute. Not too petulant: "That's obvious."

The Elder taints Zav's cleverness with a bitter curl of his upper lip.

"I'd rather wait till your wife carves this answer on your soul." _Finality!_

Zav's preening curiosity ("Most fragile self-assuredness!" _Ha_.) shatters as the door shuts behind the exiting Elder.

"Mark, did you ever think about, about getting one pregnant?"

Both were supposed to be preparing for their graduation. Writing invitations. Sending out some resumes. Thinking about other things. Becoming consumed with the details of entering _Coupling—_ hoping for an interesting work assignment, reviewing paint patches in anticipation of their first home, things like that...but not Zav—"Did you ever think you'd might leak?...Then _what_?!"

Mark pauses... resigned, "Okay. I'll indulge you. _No._ "

There was a silence. Itchy. Zav wasn't as easy to swat as a mosquito.

"Okay. Sure. Who hasn't?"

Swat!

"But I never talk about it. _We—_ me, Cilla, any girl...never talked about it."

Swat! Swat!

Mark gathered up his stuff: pen, cards, books...all which told Zav that he wasn't going to sit "through one of these _serious_ talks, again!" _Firking poet!_  
"Come on, guy, don't you think that's significant. _Now_?"

Mark halts. Feels like a defendant in the dock. "Father Almighty! Okay. What good would it have done? Scare the daylights out of her? Nothing you could do, even if you wanted. If, and I say "if" — _if_ she thought you were thinking about it...bang, _blam!_ gate shut—no pussy, tonight!"

"Gotcha, but if you felt it... _if_ you felt it and we were _supposed_ to be pleasured, we were supposed to empty ourselves and explore _every_ aspect of our sexuality...why, why the hell didn't we?.... _Didn't I_?"

("What would I put in Column B?")

Trying to fall asleep, trying to shut-down the out-of-control fluttering _Flicker_...but he can't. He sees himself sitting there, on their couch, asking Lil, "Did you?"...and she explodes, not into words, but her whole body, as if the answer was so powerful that it detonates her body, her body becoming one word, one sound, the only answer.

He looks at Cilla, but it is clear that she is deaf and blind.

He tries to remember...is hating himself for having buried the memories...about more than once, several times, just about to pop the question...it seemed like that, "Pop the Question" being the Playful phrase for asking a girl to become a woman by marrying you—you, then, a real man...not just a boy, even more than a guy... _Real man!_...when she says, _Yes_.

Pop the question: "Do you want to get pregnant?" In the question delivering the answer, "Yes, I can!" _unFixed and with Balls!_

But he didn't. _Why?_

("Ain't I _Bad_?")

Zav sees himself at so many moments of questions—the "Can I?" questions. Lick you? Bang-bang the back-door? Come in your mouth? Get you to crank me?...it seemed that every act had, at one time, a "Can I?" question around which hung an odor of death—dying if she said _No_ or rolled-away. It took sometime for the boys to catch-on that the girls had been trained to "Do what you must!"

("But for all those years, you didn't pop the question...not even once?!")

Falling-asleep. Into a dreamscape. Aware. Watching himself as another...a monstrous figure of fearsome height and breadth...snatches away the blanket which covers him and Lil. Snatched, but she stays locked in dead-sleep. It is Zav's eyes which a dreadful fear rips open, opens-wide, his heart pounding, he hears his heart-pounding in his ears.

Monstrous and fearsome, so he, himself, rises. Stands in front of this alien one as armor is placed upon him, as a sword is received by his hand which rises effortlessly to receive...then it is he beside this one, this one whose presence he now knows as his own presence—they looking down on Lil as she slumbers, as she dreams, as they stand vigilant by her side...guarding, protecting, securing.

("Preparation!")

"Twenty! _Twenty!_ " ...boisterous and booming and bottle-clanking—drunk as skunks, graduated and degreed... _S_ _tupid as sloths!_ brashly proclaimed...ever-ready, now knowing what they meantby "Live Long and Prosper!"

# CHAPTER 13

"Live long and prosper!" Each time they said it, a swell surged through them. It was power. It was hope. It was a vision. As vision, it had first been given to them.

Elements of the vision, but not full sight. For _seeing_ was the core message of the vision itself, and something which could only be experienced as each blindly stumbled.

Stumbling was how Lil looks back upon the _Courting_ years. Though she enjoyed "Game!" and though she had always been faithful to the twin imperatives: "Love as many as you can!" and "Do whatever you must!"...there was no sight, so she is now realizing, because there was no boundary—there was no cause for an assault on a forbidden area, for nothing was forbidden...they knew not the Game's source but they did know its end—expressed by a slogan they prodded each other with whenever one did hesitate to follow the two imperatives..."Not yet!"

This sufficed. "Not yet!" meaning that the regulations, the ordinations, the boundaries set once they became Twenty...when they entered into _relationships..._ everything was permitted until then, so the teenagers shouted, "Not yet!"

_Coupling_ —Lil is seeing Zav as boundary. _What is he as now forbidden?_

For most, they would _Couple_ long and stumble often before they would gain "First Sight!"

That First Sight which was all that relationship was, and so, derivatively and essentially, what sexual _Coupling_ evokes... _Intimacy._

It was a First Sight into the meaning of "Live long and prosper!"

It was a First Sight of the flesh in its fullness...being whole as one soul, one spirit, as one _Presence._ Yet, to become as One and so fully one's own self—"one's oneness"—meant finding the boundary of self...which only came when your Lover found their boundary of self...then "I am" would be truly definable—"Know thy presence and so live long and prosper!"...another slogan of _Coupling_.

" _Presence_. This is what lives long and prospers!" Uttered by an Ancient One, long in service to the world, a dedicated being—one who was high in the hierarchy of realms secular and sacred, so they were told—to the girls. An Ancient One's voice—a Presence. As a figure, obscured. ("Why?!") Was it a man or a woman? "Does it matter?" answers the teacher, in that way which invites no further questions.

Cilla watched. Absorbed. She couldn't even peek aside at Lil.

The shaded figure, the commanding voice: _ageless_ , it had appeared once before, when they were thirteen, just being introduced to The Game.

"Do whatever you must." The Ancient One's phrase from back then. There had been much left unsaid, which is revealed now—"Because you can _never_ do whatever you will."

Cilla thinks she understands. Lil is a bit more annoyed than perplexed.

The voice: "What is it you _will?_ "

Cilla: _Mark!_

Lil: _To blossom!_

Despite the moment, Lil wasn't thinking about Zav.

Ancient voice: "Presence _cannot_ be willed."

Back then, the word _presence_ had been introduced, but not ensconced with the special dignity, even mystery that pervades the Ancient One's tone. "You girls are the presence of The Mother. But so, now, as She was _before_ she blossomed. It is Her desire to blossom through each one of you. _Now and forever!_ "

As she listens...this voice so magical!...so Cilla sees herself blossoming. As she observed her own mother swell pregnant with her ninth and last child—Cilla being number four. As with her sister now in full bloom as her first is due, any day now. This aged voice made her see, cleared away a haze unknown to Cilla until just now, that blossoming was the living long through _Coupling_.

("Blossom through pregnancy?")

"All boys are farmers. They must work the land before it will yield harvest. They must labor with every tool they have to make the ground ready. Only then can sow seed. Only then can rightly anticipate the harvest."

"All girls—the farm"...a thrill, one curious, breath-taking—all which makes her feel as if she is the only one being instructed.

"Prosperity," the Ancient One, "is in the harvest." At once _final_. At once _chilling_. At once— _Future_.

"Live long and prosper," each greets, without exclamation...more, probing the other, inquiring, "Is it still _you_?"

They were back at the sorority. In the common room, each going to their separate apartment when Lil stops, waves Cilla towards her...it was a familiar gesture, so she follows.

For nearly half-an-hour they simply set about preparing for dinner. Then, out of nowhere, not an answer to a voice question— "I don't know if I can do it"...exhaled, sloppily aired, between slicing the onions and the carrots...Lil knew that she didn't really want to say it, to confess it, to utter it, but she had to...and only Cilla could hear it.

Cilla hears, but shakes her head, as if shaking a gift, wondering what's inside...yet she is, also, instantly disturbed, not by understanding the full import but by the shared feeling—Lil is highly distressed; _down_.

Lil stops slicing and paring.

She gazes off, far distance—frozen and stiff. A cardboard cut-out. No motion.

Cilla pauses, her mind racing, avoiding but careening between "Just finish the meal and go!" and "Oh, no! _Please_."

It was now Lil drinking more than she has ever, more than she ought. But this is not of the moment. Cilla is not drinking at all.

"I have never been satisfied. _Never_."

Cilla retreats from pressing, _Never?_

"On my first night, I did what I had to. I did everything he asked. Even somethings he didn't ask. And that's it. I just wasn't satisfied. No, more...wasn't _filled_." She presses her eyebrows as if trying to squeeze more thought from out her forehead. "No, I never felt the presence. Not, at least, as I thought it would be or could be."

Cilla wanted to say, "Maybe that's all there is," but didn't...just listened. Let her friend drink and talk, talk and drink—it wasn't a conscious choice, just a comfortable one.

"I'm the one who kept asking for _more_. That he bring others. I even got them to always to agree to Tag Teams. _Switcheroo!_ I liked women. I still do. But that wasn't it, either. Even when they thought it was only for them...it was show, for it was _for me_."

Cilla hated Tag Teams— _never liked the switcheroo!—_ not that she was shocked by Lil, in fact, it made sense. Lil was like _that_ , but being like _that_ was supposed to be a special sign, one that you were especially chosen to blossom. _Curious_.

"I'm a goddess. At times, I am _the_ goddess. I just don't _feel_ like...no, I just _don't_ _want_ to become _mother_."

Cilla—Who could have blamed her?...reached for the bottle of whiskey...poured herself a tall glassful—three fingers!

"Clever? You think you know what it means?"

"Girls are stupid. Don't you see? They're cows. Not like cows. They _are_ cows. _Dumb_."

"It's just a slogan. _To live eternally._ Get married and so live eternally, right?"

"Who knows? Yeah. Maybe. Maybe that's how they're told. Sure. Many believe that. Like me, they take it at face value. Will take the easiest meaning. But not this time. This time I'm the poet."

"So?"

"Females live short lives. Get it?"

"That means what?"

"Girls have sex only during their teen years. A short time. _We're_ the long timers." Pauses. Almost sneers. Avoids looking at Zav. Doesn't give a damn whether he believes him or not. _I know!_ "—internal monologue...out loud: "Women are even shorter. They bear kids, for what, twenty years, give or take some. Then what?" At this point, he does turn towards Zav. Stares at Zav. Consciously and intentionally stares...wants to see his response: " _Then what?_ "

# CHAPTER 14

The boys had just come off a rousing three day, wild drunk...Zav popping out of his "self-time" one night right after finishing his spaghetti and meatballs—"One more time!" He and Mark were off: getting off all over the place...Zav looking at Mark and Mark looking at Zav—" _Live long and prosper!_ Whatever that really means! _Ha-ha._ ".. clinking glasses: "Firk! May we live long and prosper, _together!_ " A camaraderie of spirit not yet sullied by Mark's _Flow_ with Lil.

Three days of no-sleep, so it did seem like a joke. Only the official letterhead seemed to sober him up.

"Drafted?!"

"This is not supposed to happen? _Can't be!_ "

"Shit. No!"

Mark was incredulous. Hung Zav's letter from his fingertips as if it were a sheet of unrecycled, soiled toilet paper. His disgust was threaded with fright.

Zav just pressed his body further back into the fatness of the over-stuffed chair...seeking to be sucked into another dimension... pressing backwards and drinking forwards— _Ten down, ten to go!_ as in his mind's eye he shouted encouragement from the sideline— _Drink. Drink. Drink. To Oblivion!_ A funereal melody cloyed the air.

"In Africa" had been and is a phrase of their life to date. It was like air. "The wars in Africa." Not just war, but multiple wars. Continuous. So complex. So ever-changing. Names of countries. Acronyms for enemies. Banner titles for victories. It was all a blur. And it was never but to be a blur. _War_ had no solid meaning for them...they never had to pay close attention to it. Several years before they were to be Fixed...a time which they could hardly remember...it was then that the word was left off their vocabulary list. Not to be "in Africa" is what each thought was the reason they had been chosen to live in the Education Zone.

The running parental threat had been—" _Bad_ boys go to Africa." _Bad_ not specifically defined. Rather it stood for everything the rowdy youths wanted to do which their parents didn't. But there had also been its use, later—"Boys not charming. Not invited to _Couple_. Shipped off to Africa!" Both had heard this recurring whip...from fathers, teachers and instructional films. "If she doesn't Invite you... _We_ welcome you!" This, an omnipresent ad run on the campus vine: all media...arms open, a medal-bedecked General, standing next to a battle camouflaged solider—young, a near or just twenty-someone who was not smiling, but standing proud, bolt-erect and fierce—the General drops an fatherly arm around the soldier, gives him a fatherly shake.

But as with anything used too often, the ads, the parental threats, the whole notion of "in Africa" just was ignored by the percolating sexual divines of teenage-hood of those taking The Course.

Yet, what the teachers knew, the Elders too, and all who grew into parenthood...that something so omnipresent as _war_ was, proved, inevitably, also subliminally to be quite effective. Zav was shocked because few ever chosen en for the Education Zone flunked out.

Omnipresent yet trivial— _In Africa_ was a media section all to itself. Like _Sports_. There were accounts of heroism. Of clever battle tactics. No deaths reported, which was, as murder, unknown to the boys... _war_ : all was capture and conquering. Spiced with "Confessions of The Enemy." Stuff like that. Most ten year olds read every lurid story. Most eleven year olds were more anxious to be Fixed. Most twelve years olds simply worried about passing the test which qualified for The Course...which, itself, selected out as it selected in.

"Fixed and _not_ in Africa!" A pube taunt to those not in The Course...one bandied about with goosebumps and dry gulps.

Now, something's happening which, so it appears, no one has ever heard as having happened before. It was the silence...more soundless than the actual disappearance of their teachers and those _deus ex machina_ Elders...it was _their_ silence—that of the boys and girls...they simply could not speak about this to each other. Just stare. Usually from behind some numbing liquid shield.

Every bar was packed. Bodies stuffed and outside human forms splayed drunk on the sidewalks. "Packed but not stacked!" This was the most depressing slogan—unambiguous code that a bar was lacking girls...worse, at this moment, no one caring nor counting on a finger or two the girls, to a teat, Greenies...nor noticing the most shocking fact: "Sober Greenies!"

Odorously male and no music thumping—all slacked jaw and stone-eyed...collectively sodden but each incredulously facing the sobering reality of their peculiar fate.

" _Everyone?_ "

Zav glances around, looking for a table; some spot, somewhere.

"Firk! Sure looks like it. The whole screwed senior class!"

Death Sentence— _Fixed and in Africa!_ scrawled on the walls and written in fright on the eyes of soundless inebriates.

"Guy, something weird's happening." Zav's idiotically naked words afloat as he unscrews this day's third quart of Tequila...who, before he can even salute the worm, vomits chokingly and explosively.

As the girls prowl the streets, every bar searched— _Is this happening everywhere?_ If they hadn't fully grasped all those lectures on "the collective body and soul," well, right now it was a handy phrase to help get a grip on the chaos.

"Did we all die and _not-Ascend_?"

Snagging a head-down, hurrying-by sorority Sister, "Do you know where Mark is?"

Ripped away in muted huffing, arms flying as if swatting flies, "No!"

Lil and Cilla hurry along, peeking, surveying in and out of familiar haunts; strange ones.

By the time they find their boys...who are shades beyond even their most historic and epic stinking blottos, both having bits of vomit indiscreetly exposed up, down, under and on top—absurdly looking like _freckles_.

Worse, Mark was at his usual madcap antics...challenging Zav to stand one-foot on the band-stand edge, teetering with two hands slobbering spitting spirits...Cilla gasps, but neither sees them nor hears them. _Bravado_ : as he jumps to the dance-floor, flinging booze like ...few guys pay notice, fewer care—only their girls are frightened..."My buddy," burbled and blistered in drunken voice, "My buddy eats a mountain of hot dogs. Any takers?"

"Gotta beat ten in a minute," screams Zav, screaming at no one but at everyone...screeching screaming his last as he plunges face down, nose bloodying face down, onto the table. _Soft whacking thud_.

_Stupid drunks_ , each girl thinks but does not say. Simultaneously, each reaches out.

"Mark," almost whispered, but, as if a magical word, it turns him towards her.

Lil stands next to Zav. Alights a finger upon his nape. Rock motionless. But as if just this nudge of hers carries potent energy, Zav slips away from her, slides and slumps—unconscious fingers grasping the table's edge, almost ass to the ground, just a dead fish with eyes plunk open as he falls, sprawls full-bodied onto the floor...no tail wagging.

How they got them to their apartment is another story. All were people of average build and height, this making the girls—pound for pound—quite weaker than the boys...but they had tugged and pulled, lurched and bounced, heaved and shoved their way down the several streets...fortunately for all it was late Spring and all the ice had melted.

Lil—at a total loss—lewdly suggests, tip-toeing in front of their weakening eyelids, "French Maid!" It was a mark of the moment that this does not arouse their lechery...not a speck.

"If not boobs, what?" To Cilla; to the boys.

Neither responds to any kind of stimulation. Flies unzipped and fingers bowling. Nervously breathed promises of endless pleasure.

Both girls withdraw, bonded by a shared but equally strange emotion: _disgusted fright_.

"Zombies!"

"My gosh! Yes, but _what's happening?_ "

They snap on the _Flicker_ to see if this is reality— _really real?_

Local News carries no reportage of any campus activity. _Odd._

Half-hour later it is announced that there is commencing, as of this day, a total National News black-out on daily _In Africa_ reportage. "This is really _Bad_." But they meant that for themselves...as potential _Couples_ , that's all.

Slumbering in their collective abandon, the boys mope about confronting _the facts._ "Africa is _Bad_. It has always been _Bad_. _Bad_ in a way you do not know, but must come to know. The males are all loaded. Their population is out of control. Disease ravages the cities and hamlets. For the first time in millennia, we are threatened!"

It is the General, in full regalia...earnest but stern— _fatherly_ in the most demanding tone. "In the past we have fought them with the dredges, the failures, the outcasts, the heretics of our own society. We had faith in "fighting fire with fire." _Bad_ against _Bad_...It hasn't worked. So, today, we must start to do otherwise. This is why you in the Education Zone are being called up. Be proud, for you shall, once and for all time, _Save the World from Africa_!"

As this terse speech terminates, so did both boys rise. So did hundreds, thousands like them. Up from stupor and all other phases of the collective trance. _Awake!_ Rise from beds, saloon floors, ditches and back-seats— _Rise up!_ fully stirred in heart and with an accepting understanding, not one in words, not one which repeated the speech, but in action—a common action, that of acting as One.

Zav looks at Mark. Mark looks at Zav. They nod.

"Together!"

That evening, it was all Tag Team, their first ever...though none in the foursome would remember the night. Zav never of Lil with Mark. Mark never of Cilla with Zav. _Never_.

Not for some time, anyways.

# CHAPTER 15 STOP

Together.

The boys thought it meant all of them: _my cock is ...._

Until there was not even time for a good-bye.

A knock on the door. Two military types. Mark and Zav not knowing, at this point, how to interpret military dress and cosmetic.

"You are to come with us." _Iron-rod._

Just that. _Why had the girls left and not slept-over?_ A question not plumbed for causality or even random synchronicity. "Twenty minutes," a final reprieve, not a courtesy. _Half-naked_ : Mark and Zav were too spooked to do anything other than move awkwardly about like prisoners. "Shower." Flustered as to what to pack: "Not that," flat-voiced over and over as each started to pack clothing, toiletries, a book, a picture: "Not that."

Within twenty-two-and-one-half-minutes four guys were seen driving away from Zav and Mark's apartment.

Deserted.

As their last look back at town - their _Collegeville_ \- what struck each one, and what was acknowledged by a glance and a gulp, was that everything – _once again!_ \- seemed normal. The streets were abuzz with students: seniors and all. Greenies were about: flamboyant as targets. The sun shone brightly.

What?!

More weirdness: none of their questions were answered, possibly not even heard, for there was a glass guard fencing them off in the back-seat - _Sound-proof?_ both wondered; no voices from the front. Just a drive for several hours: _The Civic Area._

Whisked out. Whisked in. Be-whiskered, showered, again, and left naked with a bundle of fatigues on bunk-beds: top and bottom. Zav plopped into bottom, totally unzipped. Mark got dressed, quickly.

For an hour or so they do not speak. Don't even look at the other. Just took a place, some imaginal place where each felt secure.

"Fifteen minutes," whatever it meant, shouted with a rapping on the door.

Both counted every second.

"Mark. Zav." Clipped syllables; a hand-extended; shook. Brusque movements. A notebook opened. Only a General. Maybe the General? _Looks like him, anyways_.

"Gentlemen," formal smile, magisterial - neither of the boys had ever before met a magistrate - with eyes that reconnoitered: moved across each so that each felt like every aspect, every detail of their being: of mind, body and soul was being checked and a mental check-list marked.

"Gentlemen, I'm proud to meet you." Mysteriously sincere.

_Mystery._ A word, for the boys, more literary than spiritual. Not that they hadn't paid some attention on Gathering Day, at least enough to know that "There are things known and unknown," but never having had to pay much attention to _that_ Unknown. Until now.

They sat. One side of the conference table; he on the other.

"Boys," not condescending, just referential, "You're going to be shipped to Africa." Penetrating eyes. Piercing. Mark and Zav feel pierced; like two fish caught with the same spear. Without a breath, expanded, "I'm proud to say that you," and an eye for Mark and an eye for Zav, "are going to be shipped to Africa. _Proud_." Hands palm flat, resting from table edge forward.

"Proud. Because I've never had boys _like you_ before. But you know that, don't you?" Not a question, not a pause. "You know what type of boys I usually send off, don't you?" Again, no pause. " _Bad_ ," hands-withdrawn, arms-locked, serious eyes, " _Bad_ boys. But that is what today is about. _Congratulations!_ " Brusque. A surprising exclamation. The General stands, almost propels his chair into the wall, stabs across the table, poke-shakes the hands of the still seated boys: malleable, soft-clay boys: perfunctorily swivels in military arc: is out of the room before their mutually held breath releases its choke-hold.

" _Bad_!" flits through the door before it can shut, flits on the bouncy sleeve of a diminutive adult, not military, flouncing into the room, right arm gesticulating, uttering non-verbally, his word repeated two times: " _Bad_! _Bad_!" right up to a lumen, unnoticed till now, at the far-end of the room, lit up with a flick of his laser wand: holographic with neural throbs - empathetic, sympathetic, like a wave - what is there flows through the boys like waves being sucked by beach.

Again, " _Bad_! _Bad_!" He turns to the boys: "Well!" as he rolls up his right sleeve: smocked and loosely robed, neither had seen a teacher or a counselor so dressed - _What else can he be?_ \- they neck-pivot towards him: flesh and brain, yet it is their soul which he seeks: "Deacon, just call me Deacon." - A fool's wink of his eye? Not anything his voice betrays; he turns towards the lumen.

" _Bad_. It's all a matter of vision. A vision quite secular, though once hotly religious. A vision over which dead-bones still rattle like sabers ... A vision which has triumphed, as visions do, by the magic of forgetfulness."

Mark is totally lost; Zav intrigued.

For hours, a world unknown, or if somehow known, not known as so now revealed. Words, phrases, references - at best vaguely known, at worst: arcane, esoteric, abstruse - causing each to rub his eyes, massage temples, wring fingers - mental gasping, spiritual bewilderment: only trusting in the self-confidence of Deacon - the smoothness of his delivery, the almost serenity of his over-all poise, presence: because he knows, they know, so they know \- _Ah!_ the ultimate pedagogical feat!

Especially "religion" and "secular" - the words upon which all seem to pivot, return to, clarify - yet, totally mystify these two who have never applied either word to themselves or those around them!

"Mormon - once a word sliced with hatred, riled with venom, slashed with abominations. Like witches of yore, they were slaughtered. Sacrificed on the altar pyre of _The One True God_." Pictures. Flick clips rattling by. Charts. Inundating their minds. Things they had never seen. Of temporal ages they had never heard. A history unknown: "Most Grand! The Grandest of Grand Stories!" ... Deacon rhapsodized, flowed on with barely a single pause to roll-up his sleeve a tad more or to turn towards them to see if they were dozing off - he didn't care; was confident that this exposure, this immersion would work what needed to be worked within them.

"Mormons. Who, millennia ago, were the vehicle of The Ascendancy. Not that they all Ascended. No. The messenger does not always hear the message." At this a full-solid pause; so shocking in its abruptness that the boys almost stood up, as if an alarm had rung.

One. Two. Breaths, and Deacon is back at the races. "More about them later. What's important, here, is for you to know there have been times and periods almost without number and all with numberless visions. In these periods what is called religion - this described and defined the vision. The Liberty Zone we now inhabit was once a Secular Society. This was a religion with a vision of being religionless. ("What?!") It was, so they called it themselves, _The End of Religion_. Yet, there were roots, some which we ourselves share, in religions: called Puritan, called Olympian - these all of which look terribly alike to us today - it was these religions from which we Ascended."

"Were they _Bad_?" Zav blurts out, shocking himself. Snapping Mark from his narcotizing doze. Without a hitch, Deacon turns towards him and says with an eagerly affirming voice, "Yes!"

_Bad_. "That is what today is about," had said the General, so Deacon veered with Zav's question and was off lecturing on _Bad_.

" _Bad_. In a way you must now work hard, study hard, think hard about. _Wake up!_ " shouted at both of them: Mark jolts a torpid eyelid; Zav his spiritual.

Within a hand-clap: " _Bad_ meant more than a downward feeling. It meant what was called Evil. Evil was ... hard to say without using their words, but think of everyone at a _Cauldron_ avoiding you." The boys can't raise the image. "I know that's impossible to you. But ..." pressed for a way to explain it this first time, "Suppose every time you penetrated a girl that she only took but did not give," stated but followed with a forehead wrinkling series of unspoken question marks???????

"No balance?" The words clung onto Mark's columnar image. "There'd be no balance? No bottom-line. No ..." but he couldn't push himself to visualize it. Deacon was pleased that Mark, _almost_ , got it!

"This is what is happening in Africa." Knowing pause, fully conscious of the felonious act about to be committed: "Do you boys know where Africa _is_?"

It would take days - ("Maybe they never got _there_?") - days and days and more days for the "reality" of the vision to seep and settle. It couldn't fully settle with this first discovery: such was expected failure: "Africa is _here_." Without more than that, Deacon clicked off his wand and left the room.

"Here?" only Zav whispered in absolute amazement.

Mark rubs his eyes.

# CHAPTER 16

_Here_.

There had never been any deep thinking about "Here."

What could Deacon mean?

Both had that thought. Each handling it his own way.

Without much comment, they ate dinner and went right to sleep.

Mark was up, fully dressed, a smile on his face. _What?_ wakens Zav.

When Mark notices him stirring, "Hey! Morning." Said in that way Zav knew that Mark wanted to say something more.

He assembles his body, seeing himself linking and locking parts, like a kid's toy.

"Okay." After the toilet, a shower, standing before the closet: one side his, with two box shelves; the other, the same. Only khakis - so he just begins, robotically.

"Okay?" Mark's "Go!" signal.

It was outlandish and ridiculous and foolish - _not like Mark at all!_ \- "Quite the imagination," ending their breakfast; rising from the table; seeing no one else but the server: this eating room just two steps down from their own - all that was included on their first day "tour."

"It has to be!" Enthusiasm. " _Evil_ , get it? - deeply down. Like Deacon was getting at - what would you do to a girl who wouldn't give back?" Something obviously Mark had considered, but totally a foreign notion to Zav.

"Walk away from her?" timid; faltering.

"No!" with a kick-punch of the air Zav had never seen Mark do - but which Mark had done often with Cilla. "No! You'd kill her!"

No words. No images. Killing was something that even the reports from Africa did not discuss. Heroes only captured Enemies, never killed. Killing was something which only happened by accident. Theirs was a time when even animals were not killed. Animals-as-food a concept inconceivable. So, Zav just couldn't.

Deacon said: "For most of human time, animals were killed. Hunted and killed. Domesticated and butchered." _Flickers_ : Zav cries: tears silent: when he first sees these words come alive in the dying eyes of slaughterhouse cattle. Equally, Mark's eyes blinked and blinked; rapidly.

Even with his words, Mark couldn't have meant what Deacon had not yet revealed, "Kill her," and he whips out his cock and strokes it, "Shoot her!" Zav sees the sperm bullets - but not since before Thirteen had he - and never would he have thought, but _Yes!_ in his mind's eye he grasps the import of Mark's action.

Deacon's discourse made Mark look like a genius. "What did we Ascend from? Leave behind?" Again, his questions are all rhetorically toned. "If we have Ascended, there must be something Descended. That is Africa. In that way, Africa is us. A balance. Actually, a mystery which is still unfolding." Turns on the lumen: "You've seen this a hundred times, if not more, on Gathering Day." It was a diagrammatic rendering of the Earth on its axis, rotating. "As you know longitude and latitude. As you know up and down. As you now the four directions. So, there is the Ascension and the Descension." With a clap: a visual neither had ever seen. "Notice, this is two vases next to each other." Teasing, "Or is it?"

"Two people kissing." Zav right on the button.

Mark: "Where?"

It was Mark's faith: his belief in himself: in columnarity, which was tested, and which grew. He had to struggle and labor to get everything into his columns: neat fit. Though he could do this, it still didn't seem real. "Not so much a balance as a negation," this phrase of Deacon really threw him.

Zav pushed back into his chair: fully relaxed.

"Gathering Day catechism, again. You learned that The Ascendancy was a shift in time and space, right? But did you ever really think about that?" _Cup. Half. Empty:_ Zav. _Why the fuck think about that?_ : Mark.

"This we know. This has been revealed. _There are many mansions in Our Parents house._ An ancient quote; modified. Useful. We are on an upper floor. Below us is Africa. But it is _us_. Just a different time and space."

Unlike the day before, a server entered with coffee and cake. They broke.

("Just?!")

"Lumen off!": darkness fades to softness of dusk: Deacon presses an unseen button: i-head-sets flipped up and out from the middle of the table. Both boys were mildly amused: technological sleight-of-hand!- but restrained themselves. It was that trick, not the i-head-sets, for such they had worn, often, in _Advanced Courting_.

"This is the vision," and they were off in a flash: an imaginal flash. I-head-sets locking on as if body parts: an immersion virtual reality toy they had often used as kids, now a something more: it drove them, they not it.

:vision - a man in flowing robes - _Deacon?_ \- back always to them, voice thrown: deep baritone, arms sweeping, hands pointing ... "The Descended are Evil. Their hearts are Evil. Their souls are Evil. They have not Ascended. More, they do not seek to Ascend!" Pictures, images, flicks: all kinds of holographs flashing, flying, flitting, fulminating ... "Watch!" And a man and a woman are in bed. They begin to caress and kiss. They move about each other's body as Mark and Zav had been taught in The Course. But there is something different, odd, peculiar. This slowly dawning. It is their eyes! Eyes which are not embracing the others. Eyes which stare off, so far off, that it is crystal clear that they are seeing only themselves. _Not worship!_ This an alien practice; exotic. But the boys are immediately enlightened, come to fully feel this Evil, not simply know the words, but become the lovers. Scenes again. Chasing and catching: then emptying. Zav clearly feels the emptying. _Heart-thump_. Watching the seed flow within but not really ever leave the cock. He observes it; is drenched by the restraining sensation of it! (" _No sex even while having sex._ ")

_Immersion_ : Peering through scene after scene, of lovers - _no! of cocks and cunts_ , so it comes like a shout of discovery: Mark's ears burn: cocks and cunts and the transformation into guns and violence, in the withdrawal and the glare of hatred, the pounding of a fist into her face, the body whipping by gun-barrel, the murderous glee and the firking of the virgin corpse ... rapid and fierce and expanding in tempo and depth of knowledge into "War!" and grasping it as linked: "War of the Sexes!" and "Sex as War!" ... historical charting: names given to times and periods, "Atomic Age," "Roman Civilization," "Moon Jubilee," "Martian Interlude" ... coming full speed to dead stop to a quiet moment: in a plush garden, a man and a woman, again. But with care. Love. That kind of love which is what Mark and Zav have been taught. Caressing. Worshipping. Yes, each boy relaxes. Sighs. _Worshipping_. She at his Pillar. Flowering it with her kisses. Praising it with her fingers. The boys are hard. They are this Pillar. She bringing the Pillar to the softness of her downy Grove ... But the man jerks away from the woman - not violently, but imaginally, the boys can see it clearly; _sharp_ : know that she can too - jerks and falls upon the ground, fully away from her: there stroking himself - _Worshipping himself!_ \- an act so desperate and forlorn that both boys are brought to tear's edge: slip. precipitously plunge! _frightfilled_ ... he, worshipping himself, playing himself, drawing his seed, splattering it into his hands - most amazingly: the Moment shattering vision - shaping from his seed another woman: not her but like her: sister face, sister soul, but it is clear, it is vision, it is seen: sister sees only him!

Mercifully, Deacon abruptly halts and ends the session. "Resume at Three." So, they have an hour to nap.

Each naps, wordless.

Each naps, dreamless.

"Why is this vision Evil?" A true question. He waits for their answers.

Mark: blinded to the source of his own insight: Steady. Confident. - "As you said. Balance. If this man could create a woman who only worships him, then how could she ever learn to become a woman? She'd just think she's him. There'd be only men."

Zav: almost smug that he understands - "It's not Evil. I mean, not only just Evil. Nothing can stand by itself, so it must've seen itself as Good?" ending not as he anticipated: as a question.

Mark frowns a _Huh?_

"Let me ask you - be on guard here! - from how you're both seeing: What is Evil about The Ascension?"

An impossible thought. No seed from which to spring. No decaying bloom from which to fall.

Deacon waits an excruciating five minutes.

"You're not half as smart nor as sixth as clever as you think?" - each hears directed at himself.

"But that's why you've been Elected."

_Elected?_ each was about to say; what does that word mean to Deacon?

"Yes," and he is full attention upon them; seated at the table for the first time; lumen off - "Elected. Haven't you wondered where your fellows are?" Just at the asking of that question does the unhailed question dawn on the boys. "At first, we were going to send the whole graduating class. Literally thousands, hundreds of thousands. We thought we should flood the time, fill up the space. That with so many, that, mathematically, one or two would discover the answer."

"But ...?" expressed on their faces, not in tongue.

A shift in the topic: "Do you think you met just by accident?"

"Sure," after a moment's pause.

"Sure," right on its back: Zav.

Deacon laughs: harshly, almost as long as a howl. The boys flinch: laughing at them. They feel down; badly down.

Deacon taps the table with his fingers as his laughter dies. Continues tapping as his mind is, clearly, elsewhere. _Where?_

"There is this notion of Sin. Of an Original Sin. I want you to really think this one through. That there was or is something so Evil in us that it defines our being. Are you following me?"

A look at Zav. At Mark. "Of course not!" muted sigh.

"You saw the Dumb story. It's called Adam and Eve. It's why it's from the Mormons that we Ascended. You'll learn this," pausing as if he had struck them, pausing to be careful with what he must now do: "Tonight as you sleep you will dream. Dream deeply. Trust me. In the morning you will know. As much as you need to know. But I want to say - I'm sure the General said this too - that I'm proud to have met you. Privileged to have instructed you." He finished and then stood up. Both boys stood up, also.

"One last thing," as he picks out two envelopes, "Commit this to memory. Like Gathering Day catechism."

He leaves the room: quietly and softly - balance to his entrance.

Zav and Mark reflexively open their envelopes: read.

Original Sin - "We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam's transgression."

Given all that had been said: all so strange and weird and unsettling: as each reads, each thought he understood. Shrewdly, each memorizes the sentence, exactly - _Just in case!_

: _tonightasyousleepyouwilldreamdreamdeeply:_

# CHAPTER A

March noticed that she was looking at him. It was like that: like a fingertip gently stroking his left earlobe (" _Never told!_ "), so has he come to know the contact, even the direction, not having to lift his eyes nor slyly rotate his head nor even cadge a glance - _Not even a glance!_ \- he knew she'd be saying that, thinking it, talking to herself, "Suffer!" his whole body yells, screams back at her: he fading into a mist of bar stool smoke, puffing a big, fat log of a cigar, toking it slowly, blowing clouds of smoke, laughing currents through them, swirling, rising high, she ever eager for smoke-signals, so he knows, "(Bitch! Can't you read?"), knows as the tingling intensifies, her misery, her whelpish whimpering - _Shit!_ \- March stands up, slips his drink like a ring, shot-glass, and walks towards her, not to meet her, but to snag her, drag her, like netting fish: others attach to him like seaweed and crabs and other fickle flotsam and jetsam ... out the door: no name, no face - but he knows: not a moment's hesitation!

Who at "The Chalice" didn't know March Forbar? Knew him because they couldn't _not_ see him. Six-six, a thundering clunk of muscular flesh, screaming pure blond hair with stunning glints of red: hair which always glinted, even in the dark \- crimson specks which appeared to be pulses: _Everyone is fascinated!_ \- he knows that, has lived with it all his life, as he has with being the leader, the champion, the First Team whatever team. His was a world fitted to his body: like dressing in the morning, he put on the day, everyone and everything was adornment to him: _Fits!_ \- is not only word of ritual, of the affirmation that what is in the mirror is perfect and as it should be, but it is confirmation of the readiness of the day to meet him: it is the world which fits about him. "Everything in its place," not an exclamation but a requirement; not an expectation, but a demand - "There's a place for everything," he was fond of asserting, "Everything fits."

_Oh, dear God!_ \- This almost her only prayer; praying now for time she did not count - "Oh, dear God!" with hands pressed hard together, as if the fingers were poised to pounce, wrestle the members of the other hand: _ohdeargod_ : for what more had Prissy ever prayed? "Prissy, what do you want to pray for tonight, dear?" - never the nerve to say to her Mother what it was her Mother had told her was the only thing worthwhile to pray for: "A good husband, dear. A good husband." The second, a confirmation of how important the first statement had been. For what else would a good and proper Mormon daughter pray for - tell her mother she's praying for? - than a good husband? "To become an Eternal Family we must marry a good husband," not she said "good man" or "good male," no, meaning exactly what she said, "husband" - Priscilla knowing at the youngest of ages the nuanced difference between a "good man" - as she later came to titter: "stud!" - and a "good husband." The latter is the one who will seed her with children aplenty, and commit himself to her for eternity: "Sealed marriage," Mother had stopped saying it; it needed not to be said anymore: "Sealed marriage is the only marriage for you, Prissy."

(" _We?_ ")

For her whole life Priscilla has privately prayed this only prayer - until college. _No_ \- she corrects this internal dialogue - _You prayed this until... s_ he struggles to move to the next sentence: for she knows the thought, itself, marks the departure: _until you met the men from The Chalice!_

Could this be her whole defense? She sees herself standing before a jury - a jury of two: Mom and Dad ... but she knows, a jury celestial, here and on other planets - she does not have to lie down to dream this, for she sees it in front of her: here as she has frozen her stroke, knowing that this stroke: to sign her name, knowing that this first stroke, this "P" once formed was the mark, itself a seal - that she was condemning herself: _What verdict could the jury bring in but ....?_

There had been many clever girls. "Some women," a phrase of wicked chuckle: _women_ popping open their blouses, blowing up skirts, zipping down his fly - _Divorcees, mostly, but that widow - ah, the widow!_ ... a sentence of erotic recall which forms as image, slithers down, sweaty red hot testosterone, searing his thighs: he opens the note as he jiggles his legs, shaking off the memory ... perfumed note, just his name: _March_ \- "Bitch, probably doesn't even know my last name!" - again, not said, just from ear to ear, an echo of an oft sounded sentiment: a bitterness no one but March could taste: more bitter than sucking down cigar-ash afloat all night in a gulp of brandy - _How many times?!_ ... "Forbar, March, it's French." But he knew there was more. His father averts his eyes as he says it, casting down his words, not proclaiming them: this so unambiguously clear to a young man whose heart and mind was his name: _March!_ \- Years later, on his own: freshman, doing some stupid paper on "Your Family History," finding it not just French, but as a French-disguise: a masque ... It came to him more than any printed word: he knew his roots - twenty generations in Skaneateles: streets named for his ancient ones, the library itself: major donors, athletic trophies stamped _Forbar:_ "Mine, too! _State Champions. MVP._ " ... it just came: it ran up to him, he heard its patter: not thudding, not shoe-leather, no, patter: moccasin, fast, speedy - his blood raced as he raced towards the goal-line! - _Four Bear_ : an ancient chief, medicine man - _Why the shame?_

"March" on the envelope. Single-sheet, invitation card: no frills, no fancy, her name: "Priscilla." Clear, but as clear is feminine: full-strokes, not just readable but vocal: speaking in their delighted stroll across the card: "Innocence!"

He heard. March hears. (" _Bitch!_ ")

# CHAPTER B

"Ex-er!" flags him down.

It was another _flower athlete_ : needing the blossom!

Xer smiles at him, his best business smile; knows the face, so it's a slick exchange.

He watches him stride away - in what he's heard the girls call a "manly stride" - as if he's going somewhere and you better chase him and catch him or he'll be there without you! Xer snickers to no one but himself. Not a blossom man - _Never!_ \- he prefers the ancient way: _blood!_

Clinking a glass: "Blood!" and the five guzzle it down; two vines yet to consume - _If it weren't for the flower athletes....!_ a silent toast: solitary, but if he had asked, all would have chorused: "Flowers!" and slung down another and another and another ... "It pays the bills," he has said to more than one virtuous girl - "Have to keep away from those Mormon chicks!" gulping another silent toast: as it warms him, he knows he won't: _Can't!_

He knows that the easy-ones become too easy. That there's always some who were on their way down long before he came by; that he was but pretext. They'd protest - _Afterwards!_ \- that it was the smoke, "I inhaled your smoke!" as if he had gotten them pregnant, but he laughs, since he doesn't smoke dope, just cheap stogies. Anyways, he lets them indict him; cry and cast all the damnations of their fathers upon him, threats of burly brothers, "Break your nose!" - he could see his nose more cubed than the ancient Cubists!

"Kissing you made me drunk! Now look at me!" - so, why did he care? _Don't_. It's all sob-story and sin and guilt which would make sense to lots of guys, but not him, not religious by any stretch. "Did some time in Bible Camp!" he'd joke, but he didn't care a might. Just as long as he'd get his, _What the fuck?!_

_Blood-sucking_ over: Xer heads-out on his own hunt, for his own pleasure. He likes seducing the "good girls" \- and, he had to admit, there was something woefully pleasurable in all their recriminations and confessions and harrowing sobs of "losing my soul!" ... it was like a loop, an ellipse or something: _Fuck_ at one end, then _Forgiveness_ at the other, then looping back to _Fuck_ : but, sometimes, it got tiring, too predictable. That's where he's tonight.

"Pandora's Box" lights up the street-night. Not that it was garish, just bright. Brighter than it was clear: the lettering was smudged - no other word for Xer: _they run together_ is what his eyes say as they roll over the letters, but, as with its other intended clientele, once he had found it, finding it again was simply a matter of locating this bright gleam at the north end of campus.

Inside was as dark as the perimeter had been bright.

"Garishly dark?" amused him.

It took moments of visual decompression to adjust: but he was finally in.

"The usual?"

A nod and the already poured mug of wine: not blood as he liked blood, always too watered-down, but it was sweet, and that carried the moment, for he was here to burn energy: "Fill 'er up!" as he swigged it down and took a second: the waitress had not moved: _Xer is a regular_.

_Boom, boom!_ Just two thunderous strikes: electrified and frying the air - Everyone turns: _Xer turns_ \- "And now!," overdone in voice, dress, sloppy make-up: "And now! _Lacy Lily_!"

Xer tries to keep his hard down - even pops ("Only here!") a low-meg "dead-eye-dick": not wanting his cock to see! ... The first time he had seen her, he had been mugged: by his own prick! Popped out and blasted him away before she had really even begun. _He doesn't want that anymore; not now._

"The Box," as most college-boys like to call it, has seen a lot of talent. Had become a debutante stage for waves of college-girls trying to make a quick buck the easy way. Many famed reputations - and a few lame ones - have been made at The Box. But none had ever come on as quickly as Lacy Lily's.

_Festooned_ is the only word - not that any of the boys were comparing adjectives - but she _is_ Lace. Wrapped, almost cocooned, but subtlely - and this was her way, the way of the slightest tease and the most mis-directing come-hither shimmy - subtlely: a slight breeze sucking to soundless whirlwind: Lily is unwinding herself: Xer sees it - _she is lashed and tied_ , this which savages their first-sight, for she is not just dressed, not just wrapped: she is captive, _your captive_ , Xer's captive, captured but _Oh!_ , ever so free! she with a dainty shoulder-shudder here and a coy chesty-shiver and sigh there slowly unfurls as she winds you up: Xer is being bound, _happy to be bound!_ ... all the boys are in collective capture and rapture, for Lily is gossamer lace upon her shoulders, sinuous shawl gliding, revealing the faintest of pearl-dew upon her breasts, holding her, cupping her, every man feeling his hands cupping her, and they float away as she turns and the amazement of her breasts is not that they are exceptionally beautiful or distinctly physical but that they are _gifts_ \- delicate: intricate, elegant: fragile lace: hand-crochet: falling like sun-shower snow, a slight fluttering fall; breasts are her name-sake flower, ivory petals: belles with roseate berries: blossoms all of a sudden, no longer captive, yet only free because each boy is shouting her name, _Lily! -_ each boy receiving her: and she is in full-bloom, shedding her skirt as if walking out from high grass: _emerging_ , Xer and each boy, by this time, forgetful of their drugs and drink, drinking only herself as blood; their common cock all sprung to life, defying any restraint, any jailer ... there are boys ejaculating in private, some tipping hand-jacking waitresses, others mastering the fire, chasing it back, but ever throwing more fuel of desire upon it: Lily is but high-heels: pearled with diamond-spars, and masked betrayal of veiled face: a misty, pearlescent drape of mystifying allure, baring only elusive lips: rumor is that her eyes are pure pearl-blue: _moonbeams!_ that her face is flawless maiden flesh! that her nymphish lips are opalescent: not human lips, but lips of blazing pure light ... for the rumors are that Lily is a fallen-away former Catholic nun, one yet fully Virgin; another, that she is a Goddess, a Tantric Goddess of Yore come back to announce a new Age of Free Love ... _rumors! rumors!_ what did Xer care? what did any boy care? It is known that no one knows who Lily is: that her pearl-eye veil has never been lifted ... Still it is truly her voice which vexes: a voice beguiling in innocence, a voice so ageless, at once the timbre of maturity: maternal yet trilled by a plaint, a quavering cry, almost a whimper of childish ardour: her baffling voice which suckles the stuff of rumors, the passion of legends: "Boys!" as if breathed from her heart!: "Boys! I desire you," with a suppliant bend and her breasts are petted by every boy there: Xer pets her, his tongue is sand: "Boys! I desire you," with a hand on hip and backwards glance at them: that shrouded gaze, interpreted by each as each so desires, but by all as, "You are the one!"; her ass, a marvel to behold! _precious!_ calls them home, "Boys!" and the tension in their collective thighs is at iron-wrought and grenade-pin-yanked: "Boys! I desire you," with the full recline upon the stage's only prop: a divan, one so small that it simply form-fits her body, such that as she reclines it appears that she is floating: vaporishly flutters her arms back, artlessly spreads her legs, slowly, gracefully, like a soft, sweet-kissing, so her legs welcome, beckon: cherry lips offered to all there awaiting her only kiss ... in one swoop of enthralled imagining all kissing her and adoring her: she - _By what alchemy?!_ \- enrages them, infuriates them, enflames them: they hurl at her every power contained within themselves: groans, desires, hatreds, love, fear, amazement ... a panoply of imagination most manifest in their collective exhalation: their collective ejaculation of body and soul, " _Lily!_ "

# CHAPTER C

He liked playing the game. Better than any athletic competition, firking afforded a battleground for true conquest. There was something which struck him deeply: to his core, a pleasure his mind could not, would never name - from his first to every one thereafter - he made them yield, more, _Total Surrender_. In some way expose, betray their nakedness wielding an instrument of violence: word, fist, bite, yell, slap, scream, frantic gasping for air - he liked that best: himself as a choke, _peine forte et dure_ : every ounce, every drop of sweat of his two-hundred-fifty-five pounds pressing them - special holds for each size: the tiny ones he'd cover like suffocation, sweeping their arms and legs inside his, his chest flattening their faces; others he'd adjust: wrapping like a constrictor, fingers gripping and shutting and mangling, toes digging in, nails gouging relics of these with whom - he laughs at the moment and ever at the moments of memory - "With whom Death does us part!" ... for it is Death he meets on the battlefield of their flesh, against Death he fences, his broadsword whirled and plunged, cracking upon their heads: north and south: his _noble-head_ cracking open, spitting upon them, for he spits at Death - March struts back and forth at bed's border, circling her: territorial marking: she, Death in all Her disguises, tricks, foolishnesses - "Fool!" he screams, he speaks, he fiercely grins at her: she now dead, as dead as total exhaustion and total treasure plundering, as dead as one alive can be whose body and soul has been pillaged, resoundly firked: _March, Victor!_

The game was best played with girls. "Girls" being those yet virginal or at least "poorly firked." Meaning, for March, that they'd been penetrated: stuck, rammed, probed, creamed \- but not really firked. They knew nothing of yielding; of the war the game was: of conquest. He could tell it in their eyes: which looked at him not knowing him as Enemy!

_Priscilla._ He liked the absolute idiocy of it all! Almost the Trojan Horse; the Maiden in the Tower letting down her hair ... ambuscade: drawbridge of open-arms: _Only dumb broads!_ but in his mind he does not see her this way. _Dumb:_ only after he has made them so. Lied to them, fooled them, seduced them - _he_ making them do what they don't know they're doing! But, here, now, never having had a note, an invitation: _Bait?_ : it delights him no end. All throughout the day it made him think about her - and so he knew her strange power, for he rarely thought about any single girl for more time that it took to re-live his conquest. But, _Priscilla_ \- he did not know her; none of his buddies did ... "Has to be from _Smith_ , where else?"

When should I go back to that bar?

Priscilla had chosen _Joseph Smith Seminary_ because it was - despite _The Communio_ 's denials, which few accepted as other than half-hearted false-humility - because it was "the source," meaning, where all the high administrators and upper hierarchy were schooled. Priscilla did not fancy herself a candidate for any future honored position, rather, she simply sought her Eternal Husband.

When her family talked about _Smith_ \- and they had from her earliest years, "You're a _Smithy_ \- I can read it in your eyes!" - such talk never mentioned _The Chalice_. But once at _Smith_ \- from the first moment she and her roommate Lan had a private minute - all she heard about was, "Those boys from _The Chalice!_ "

What Lan revealed - just within the first five chatty minutes! - was everything Prissy's family did not want her to ever know. Not know in detail, and, certainly, not come to personally know - "They're _Cats_!" said with a gasp and flutter, head jerking a bit this way, then that, to see if anyone had overheard: not fear, but naughty excitement! - followed by, "And we're allowed to meet them!" Giddiness and empty-headed tittering. Prissy caught Lan's silliness but, just as quickly, wondered what it all really meant: _Catholics?_

Priscilla had mastered the answers; received high grades on First Day, but she had never pressed to understand, just pass the course; be promoted.

_Cats_ , to her - and to all about, even the Catholics, themselves - were a remnant sect from before "The Grand Mormon Ascendancy," now some two-hundred and ten-years celebrated. All knew that they were, once, "universal" - as the students were told is the definition of the word _catholic_ \- "Almost, as the Saints are, today."

Not too much detail was conveyed in First Day classes, and as the centuries passed, the rendition became quite abbreviated and stylized, though such was not a pedagogical insight of the day. Few First Day charges cared but little about the meaning of what they were hearing.

"Catholics" - even the Catholics had this in their "Approved" version: approved by _The Communio_ \- "Catholics were the first Christians to preach the Word around the world. They had a vast empire which ruled both souls and states. Their error was a doctrine called "Original Sin." They held that humans were born alienated from God. That the erotic _Embrace_ was the cause of this terrible primal Sin. This lead to several other perplexing errors, most notably, salvation by faith alone, and Jesus as an idol. Believing that only Jesus was god - _One God_. Incomprehensibly, they held that Jesus was not married. This lead to a most peculiar practice called celibacy. They denied the erotic _Embrace_! Only the males rose in their hierarchy and were priests. One, called "The Father" or _Papa_ was elected to rule. They did not know _Our Parents_! As is proper and just in the Harmony of All Things, the Catholic Error and False Teachings are those from which we, Mormons, have Ascended."

What was not talked about were the relentless waves of persecution: _spiritual genocide_. The century-and-half Holy War waged from Salt Lake which rivaled the Catholic's own "Holy Crusades" of a hegemonic period none in Priscilla's generation (nor those just past her grandfather's) ever came to study. "The Latter Days" was a Holy War - as every Holy War ever was (as _The Communio_ so wisely comprehended) - which was, simultaneously, secular. Though there had been - and, possibly, because there had been - twelve seamless successions of Mormon U.S. Presidents, each, who upon leaving secular office was elected to _The Communio_ \- _though and because_ , as such, The Ascension was, itself, both secular and holy.

It was an Ascension, as the word implies, "To a higher Order. Not just moral, but physical. Not just spiritual, but dimensional. _In the world, but not of the world._ We, Mormons, are a different body; a sacral flesh. We are Holy Family." Words readily understood by young minds, for they were words heard from the first hour of First Day. Yet, words not grasped in their once full power, for their obverse: "individual," was no longer comprehended as it had been before The Ascension.

_The Communio_ knew - and it was their First Holy Obligation to encompass all knowing, secular and sacred \- _The Communio_ knew pre-Ascendancy individuality. That is why they allowed this remnant band of Catholics to co-exist with _Smith_.

Not that they were Catholics as Catholics had once been: "Never!" - and it was not in the consciousness of these post-Ascendancy Catholics to grasp either what they could have claimed as their past glory nor what they should claim if they did know of this past glory - for their existence was _not_ to perpetuate Catholicism as it was to effect "Final Ascendancy."

_Final Ascendancy_ \- an Old Truth now a New Truth taught on First Day, but even more, what those elected to _The Communio_ came to experience as their sacral mission and task: what was being revealed as the new definition of "Saint."

:experience - "What was the experience of Original Sin?" The first question posed to a candidate for _The Communio_. Why those who said, "Dreaming," said so was a mystery to those who, themselves, had answered with this word. It was proof \- if proof was ever really needed - to _Communio_ members that they had, indeed, Ascended, and that - _Forsooth!_ -The Ascension was continuing.

_Dreaming_ : meaning as all - _Such a mystery!_ \- spoke of "The sin of Original Sin." Not knowing the long-forgotten Augustine, nor his equally vaguely remembered reincarnation, Fraticelli Smallcap of Martian lore, but knowing the horror of what Ascendancy was not: for it was an _Embrace_ , indeed, a Holy _Embrace_ , the Scaral Erotic _Embrace_. Divinity being known only as male and female coupled - but, more, for they were wise to why there was to be a Final Ascendancy: that they, themselves, lacked a knowledge, were awaiting a final revelation: knowing, that there was more than just the erotic _Embrace_ , that there "must be": Harmony - "It is fitting, right and just!" - there must be a Fuller Fire, a more Shattering Intimacy - "Something!" which was Promise.

Within _The Communio_ the language and practice of communal dreaming was ritual and fulfillment. Communal: locked in physical _Embrace_ , embracing in imagining ardor: present to visions and insights, of transformation and transubstantiation ... indeed, _transubstantiation_ : "Exactly why we still plumb the soul-history of these Catholics," said as first explanation to new _Communio_ members. "They had bread and wine. Abominations which etherealized the cock and cunny. Yet, preparation for The Ascendancy." For The Ascendancy, itself, was a transformation which was also a "change of substance," indeed, "A transmutation. The genetic imagery is useful. We are not _them_."

Yet, they continued to look like them. _Apparition_. They could even sexually couple and produce off-spring, though this was carefully guarded-against, mainly, through the disinformation campaign which convinced The Cats that they needed condoms to realize the full pleasure of intercourse! That, plus clandestine sterilization of "that statistical number" which was too stupid to remember to properly sheathe their erotic swords.

What had been revealed - even before The Ascendancy: called "The Old Truths" - was that there was no Original Sin. Meaning, no bodily separation from the Divine. More, that each believer was a Saint, and each Saint was destined to become a god or goddess. Even more - and this is what did effect The Ascendancy - as the dream, the vision, the revelation of "Original Sin" had kept Catholics earth-bound, so the new dream, the ascended vision, the final revelation of Eternal Marriage destined the Mormons to be truly "universal" in the sense of inhabiting the universe - even most astounding: of becoming god and goddess, an Eternal Family, seeding and populating other planets.

It was not that the Cats stilled preached this Original Sin, rather, that they dreamed it. As they coupled, it thrived as their Celibate Fire. "Their desire is for themselves, not the other. Somehow having sex without erotic _Embrace_!" It was in their peculiar genital- _Embrace_ that they waged a war, a war at once earthly and celestial, a war to slay themselves, to prevent themselves from Ascending. Such was an unimaginable truth - a "New Truth" of the Ascendancy, itself - unimaginable to all except _The Communio_ : they who had the guidance of the Urim and Thummin, itself, manifesting "new sight" anew through The Ascendancy. As these Catholics bedded down: what had not Ascended still breathed.

"Sacral Fire" - one phrase spoken, now more often, inside _The Communio_.

_The Chalice_ , then, was a finally controlled experiment: Divinely mandated in The Harmony of All Things. _The Communio_ accepted its continued existence as a humbling purification. "That it exists reveals we've still work to do!" What _The Communio_ was about, then, was Final Ascendancy.

How was it to occur? _Communio_ members searched their sacred books, plumbed all secular knowledge, maintained an invasive network into every bed-room, and gathered to dream.

In their communal dreaming - this the most profound of New Truths - they shared the vision, accepted the revelation, responded to the demands of Harmony: that they must maintain and sustain the un-Ascended till - and they accepted with blessed resignation - sustain them until Final Ascension: "A dream yet to be dreamed by our Final Parents." Again, a New Truth of The Ascension: that as there had been First Parents so there will be Final Parents - the last in the line of the unAscended, the first in the line of the Final Ascension.

_Smith_ and _The Chalice_ : themselves, mysteries of a Greater Revelation. At once, the mundane lives of boys and girls; at once, the profound manifestation of The Ascendancy.

Priscilla had nothing working inside of her: nothing of mind nor reason, not of logical or even poetic flight and fancy, nothing which could comprehend nor explain _why_ she was _Courting_ March. She simply knew: as she eyes herself in the mirror, adjusting the scarf Lan has loaned her: a jet-black, inky slink which - at its moment of touch and lay - ordains her _bewitching_!

As against her neck: smooth unto marble sleek, blemishless and elegant as pure ivory - a neck which has always set her apart: watering the knees of men, ancient and young; a neck which, much like her card, her invitation to March, was daring - more, puissant - in its simplicity.

She knows that this neck is for him: _Only him!_

March enters the bar: _on the hunt_.

# CHAPTER D

"Cat and Mouse," March liked this; how he looked at the _Smith_ girls: mice. _Furry, cute - but at their best at that moment of instant death: trap snapping shut!_ He laughs. Goes over to his regular spot at the end of the bar, where he can see who's in and who's out - _No surprises!_

_:catholiccatmormonmouse_ : "Boilermaker. And keep 'em coming, Stan!"

Xer didn't like the _Smithys_. Didn't like anything which made him feel worse than he does when he stands naked - _Pathetic!_ \- computing the negatives of his self: bodily, socially, economically, intellectually ... "Shit!" If he had ever believed in a God, he would have stopped now. Or, at least \- laughing just a mite at the cursedness of it all! - "At least, I'd know He's a jokester." A Cat, but not a Good Cat: "Alley-cat" is how he puts his life down ... small, an inch or two: "Might as well be a foot!" shorter than average. Puny muscles. ("Muscles?") A face which just couldn't make up its mind what it wanted to keep: a nose, not a slope but a thing slipping - "Towards your ears," he almost whimpers as he flaps his ears. Flags of imbalance: he has tried to balance them out too many times; knows it's impossible: "One's just smaller," was his mother's kindness; others were less charitable. To top it off, he never had money - "Do now!" he rebuffs - _okay, never as a kid; but you still don't have brains!_ "Not a bookman," he throws away, as if of no great concern ... _Shit, being a Cat tops it all off! Like shit floating in a toilet bowl!_ He abruptly spins about: mental flushing.

If he had known they called her "Prissy" he would have not hesitated that mite of a moment which he did. "What is a Priscilla?" had chased down several shots and a beer. It wasn't odd, but it was uncommon. He knew that if he had asked a _Smithy_ \- "Know a Priscilla?" that he'd have saved himself some time, but that would have been exposure - of his interest, of her snatching of his interest: _Reputation!_ and another shot and a long guzzle.

Xer almost knew why he is after _her_. Almost. It wasn't that he wanted to firk her. Who didn't? It wasn't that he wanted the guys to envy his dick? _Hell, nothing will make that bigger!_ He'd take whatever would come - even their hatred, but, "That's not it," scratching his head, not his balls.

He wanted _to die_ : but it came out, "I just want to live!" _Just once. Once, be alive!_

"Whisky. Straight." Like she's said it before. Like it was _her usual_.

At this point, March doesn't care. He was doing fourths, but _Who's this?_ got him before he even realized he was two-steps towards her and beaming in, fixed on her with eyes unblinking: _Being reeled in like a fish!_ flashes: the hardened warrior within him bolts to sober alert .... freezes his step, turns towards the bartender: "Stan," just a flick of his left and he points to the right of this girl - _Girl?!_ \- so, as he sits down it's as if he's just arrived, though he knows that she knows that he knows she knows ... _Steady!_ from deep inside ... _her neck_ : like a pillar of dancing white-fire in desert darkness - _Goddam!_ as he sits, sweating the tiniest beads of alcohol sweat: feels them as large as small pebbles dripping down his face ... only the bar mirror saves him: _Cool!_

How many guys must've asked the waitresses? Even _The Box_ 's owner? How many must've staked out the back-door? How many must've followed some waitress just to find a good night's pussy but not _her_? How am I gonna do this?

They were both mirror perfect. He - suffering the benefit of practiced drinking was not sweaty; did not slur his words; had not a tipsy dip of his pinkie finger. She - just didn't know what else to do!

_Cool!_ He plays her against the glass. Not dealing with her in his space. Not drawing her into his: just glancing at her through the swooping bar-long mirror. Drawing himself to full size: even seated he loomed over everyone else nearby. Against him she was but a slight reflection. He, an Olympian God! Feels it. Nods to her, winks, as he tosses down his shot. Pauses. Just a nanosecond to catch her glance: _Does she? A twinkle from her eye?_ ... Taking time with his beer: as if all he has is time. Random time. They meeting by chance. _Ha._

She has not moved. Not smiled. Not twinkled. Only her innocence is camouflage: showering her with a softness unmatched by any doe caught in a hunter's spotlight!

Half a mug. Empty shot.

She pushes her shot of whisky towards him.

Priscilla!

Does she live at _The Box_? Is there a room there? A master of disguise? Wigs? Anyone leave in a wheelchair? Any pregnant women - _Christ what an idiot_ ... Gotta think. But not like thinking. Something he's learned from dealing blossom. Not that it was illegal and his the criminal mind, but that it was " _So Cat!_ " meaning it was only done by Catholics, not the Mormons, not even the fallen away ones (which Xer has never met, but thought he'd like to - unexpressed: _Those sorry-ass bastards!_ making him feel superior to someone! For fallen away Mormons were considered _Bad_ marriages for Catholics - even if he'd never known of one such marriage.) Naturally, Xer didn't make it a point to say he was Catholic. He did make it a point of only firking drunk girls - and he's had a _Smithy_ or two, though it nags him that they might have been lying: each time he had tallied a missing quantity of blossom at week's count. _Firked?_

"Be obvious," what his older brother had told him - a master dealer and one whom no one ever thought actually was a Catholic. "Why? I'm obvious, that's why. I deal right in the open, under everyone's nose. No one can believe I'm actually doing it. So, when I say I'm not, they believe me!" Xer was impressed. As he dealt blossom, he tried it. It worked for him, too. ... _But for catching Lacy Lily?_

"She's so obvious we're all overlooking her!" A clear thought, but a hard one to put into action. At times he wished that he, himself, did do a smidge of blossom; heard that it sharpens the senses. "What are we looking at but not seeing?"

_Priscilla_. All of a sudden he's eager to speak her name, but something is choking him - strangling him _from inside_ , squeezing his lungs. A moment of fright!

"March Forbar," words which lift him, raise him, to another level of reality: "I'm Priscilla Young."

Just like that. _Did she really speak?_ He feels a sharp pain in his heart. He knows that all of his teeth have shattered and are falling in pieces onto the bar-room floor.

She reaches over and touches his left arm. Not skin on skin. Not a tug or a pull. Not a pressing or a squeeze. _She alights!_ He senses her like a great tree receiving: branches a hundred arms vulnerable, defenseless: receiving a flock of heavenly birds - but it is just one avian messenger: _her_ ... following her, drinks left: stranded, to a booth: flying there, hovering above the crowd, gliding beyond everyone, weaving in and out, up and down on astral thermals: heart-fired: erotic sighs: no one can see them, this he knows, no one turns, no one greets him: _She alights!_

Xer is struggling to do the impossible - be there when Lacy Lily performs, but, then, not be there! To not be swept up by her charm, her fascination, her seduction .... he has come every day this week - and _Failed!_

Yet, each day: _Progress_. But he's not really sure. He's taken to stuffing cotton in his ears. To wearing dark sunglasses so as not to see - "Just one look!" he could have written that ancient lyric - her theme song: all that it means: _bawdy_ \- and, _now, what it doesn't mean_ \- but, _just one look_ , even one blurred and out-of-focus, "Just one look!" and he's like the song predicts: ball-and-chain lock-step, trudging towards the gallows!

_Friday_. For some reason, she doesn't perform on weekends. _Maybe that's it?_ But what the hell could that mean? He puts the observation in his mental file.

Since he's not gotten anywhere, he decides to do the opposite. To look at her. To hear her. To look as others have not looked. To hear as others have not heard.

"What is she when I look at her but don't see her _look_?"

"When I listen but don't hear what she wants me to hear?"

_Slam-damn, Martians rotting in the belly of hell!_ Insight. Clue.

Xer has a plan. "How obvious!"

# CHAPTER E

She waited downstairs in the reception area, just long enough to be sure that Lan was asleep. Lan, if anything, was punctual about her retiring: "10 p.m. regardless." It was 10:10.

_What is there to say?_ :from her own internal interrogator. As if she were speaking to her mother: "Is he a nice boy?" All of which would have been blown to smithereens if she said, "Yes, Momma, he's a Cat." What would that be? A nightmare?

Lan is a quiet sleeper. Only her "other mind" - how is she to grasp this? ... Priscilla was now two people. At least one inside her called the other, "that other person!" It wasn't a friendly call.

Nothing had prepared her for this: _For myself!_

The more familiar part which was regaining dominance - "Me!" it screamed; bellowed in a suffering rage: crazed for cool air and sun-bright, having been entombed in a cellar: "Torturer!"

_Me_ couldn't deal with _me-too_.

Not that her First Day training hadn't introduced her to "the world of madmen, loony ladies, the suicidal and other assorted demons." There was an acceptance that Evil existed - "In the world of the unAscended! ... But it's our world, too - well, partly."

Just not within herself: _Who is this loony lady?_

Lan woke way before Priscilla started deep-REM dreaming: rapid eye flutter. She went about her day: her prayers, her shower, twirling and twisting hangers of clothes: this blouse, that skirt, _no, no,_ these shoes, that sweater ... it must've been the residual perfume from all the soaps and oils and sprays and other assorted cosmetics because it took about twenty minutes before: "Peee-uuuuu!" A snorted reflex, reaching for a dainty hankie: muffling her nose.

Xer sat where he could watch the entrance. The bouncer - a blossom athlete! so, Xer had no trouble getting in absolutely first. Q: _What am I looking for? A: The obvious, stupid! The obvious._

Lan picks up the blouse. It smoked! Cigar, cigarette: minute stains, thick smells. It was stinking drunk! Like kissing a slob, pushing himself against her: Lan shudders with the once and forever foul memory: _Horrible!_ creeps up her arm, steadies itself to strike at her head! ... Tosses Priscilla's clothes into a hamper: _her_ hamper. If anything, these two would never share a hamper!

_Who's obvious?_ Not those loud-mouths, gaggling together trying to impress the boys, yeah, _Smithy_ s: not supposed to be here, not forbidden, once was, so he's heard, not to drink - yeah, yeah, once was, too, goddam, what a screwy religion, thank god we Cats know how to have a good time ... some brassy heavily painted ladies with glitzo guys, real fringe, but, all, all too not-obvious.

_Her?_ Watch her. Good looker. Nice clothes. A real sweet lay - but not too hot, at least not letting out her hot ... _but_ , hot enough! Xer can hardly breathe. The lights dim.

Eggs: poached. Some toast: lightly spread. A bit of jam: Mom's "little helper" package - twice a month. Sipping some coffee: de-caf.

"You've never broken a rule."

"Rules! Ain't that Old Truth stuff?"

"Don't!"

"What's Ascended if it's still the Latter Days?"

"You're _Bad_."

(Silence.)

"I say, you're _Bad_. Real _Bad_. She doesn't need to be you!" A "Go-Away! Shoo!" attitude.

"Babe, where do ya think I'm from?"

Xer had to hit himself upside his head: fairly hard left hand whacking temple: _Ouch!_ got no sympathetic ear ... _Where'd she go?_ Blood-drained and spilled, not noticing the dribble onto his trousers. He half-stands. Strains to see. _Disappeared?_

"Have I seen her before?"

Thunder-drums: "Boom! Boom!" He doesn't want to turn and look.

_Looks._  
They had prayed. Planned out their classes, decided on "Introduction to Galactic History" as their shared session. "Nothing before 9 for me!" begged Prissy; Lan laughed, a small assuring laugh.

There she is!

He follows. His best "not obvious" stalk and stealth.

It's just at twilight's end. She's still discernible. But the shadows are quickening in their consumption. Xer hastens his steps, becomes bolder. _Was it a glance over her shoulders?_ Whatever happened - he was just two blocks from _Smith_ but also two blocks from one of the three student areas filled with rentals - it happened: "I'll be damned!" _She's where?_

"Priss, how'd you like to meet some guys from _The Chalice_?"

A pause, collecting what: words, images? Almost a stutter, "Sure. I guess. Should we?"

Lan wasn't sure, all of a sudden, just exactly how to read "Priscilla Young." At first, nothing much else had to be said - the patronymic name: _Young_.

Priscilla would have distanced herself. begged off - "Not the Prophet!" - if she wasn't a descendant, but it was a hand-shake and a smile. So, Lan knew.

_Knew_ , so she's wondering now - Knew this woman's training. _Why_ she was at _Smith_. Could feel pretty sure what some mileposts would be for her: especially marriage to a mate selected for her - _selected_ , the exact word Lan now assesses, _everything for her is selected, has been, will be_.

"Should we?" stated again, but without as much uncertainty, more like "We should, shouldn't we?"

Lan thinks: _They'd want her to meet these guys_. A type of guy Lan had met, quite too often. Not Cats, but the not-so-Ascended guys who were more frequent in towns like she comes from. _Priscilla_ : Lan knows that she has never - probably, Mom and Dad had a hard time even explaining that there could be "near-Ascends" as was the more common phrase: _still burdened with Old Truths_. No near-Ascend boys at _Smith_ \- at least that's the Administration's aim! - but, Cats: for whatever reason they existed - and Lan is thinking that she's never thought that through, _not really_ \- for some reason, girls like Priscilla were selected to meet them. _But Mom and Dad never told her that - so, what am I hearing?_

"New Truths," as if summoning up all her mental strength to render a verbatim message, one Priscilla was to speak to her self at a moment like this, "New Truths are not New if the Old is still True."

Lan had never heard this one!

(" _Verily?_ ")

"Okay," exhaled: Priscilla on a tongue of courage; Lan, just pushing the throttle forward.

March has been staring at the bottle for over an hour: _I'm still full, sucker!_

# CHAPTER F

Lan knew only two guys from _The Chalice_ ; accidents. Her invitation to Priscilla had been as much a ploy to flush her out as it masked her own personal desire _not_ to meet guys from _The Chalice._ She handled Cats as many _Smithys_ did, by titillation alone. Just pretending to know some, not ever date - _Not a real date!_ \- just have a conversation: such could stand you in good stead. It showed one's edge: Lan, however, more than most, not wanting too much edge, simply because her specific past is too edgy - she's come to _Smith_ to move on up: _ascend_ in several ways. Where Priscilla Young was selected - _had always been, would always be!_ \- with a matching single-minded self-selection had Lan jumped all the hurdles: exams, charitable works, a rounded athlete, public speaking, but, more: not just public personality but private disposition - "Goddess" - she had to become a goddess, meaning all that she achieved had to be topped - or cored - with _desirability_ : having men desire her, women admiring her, true, but the males - each and everyone desiring her as Eternal Wife: companion, consort but, more, co-creator.

It was - _is!_ \- a tricky road. No one said, "Behold, a Goddess!" No, but you could sense it. It truly was an internal gift; _soulful_. Prissy had this - as she thinks it, Lan shoves her aside in her mind; "Dethroning her!" - as thought, she knows that there is something right about this thought, correct about this mental action; fitting it is as the act of a Goddess: dark powers, which none articulate but which fascinate all.

As Goddess so she played the two men from _The Chalice_ : meeting them, conversing with them while maintaining full control: being pure desire - desired by them, not desiring them! - it just seemed right. After all these years of preparation, Lan trusted her instincts, accepted and reflected, confidently, upon her images.

"That's where they go wrong." If she had had to say it, this is what she would have said; so she is saying to herself: "Most women just don't get it - _Ascending_ is a moving-on-up." Her image was of a comet hurtling, blazing through a pitch-black sky.

Why didn't Priscilla confess? Tell Lan, "I've already snagged one. He adores me." Smug. Satisfied?

_Adores_. It was what that moment had been about. Prissy is dressing; Lan is waiting. Priscilla had never been adored. The closest might have been the first reaction of a male to her mesmerizing neck. As the littlest of girls, so runs a first memory, she bends her neck for her grandfather to kiss. She can still feel his kiss: _it is still there_.

"What do we say to them?" Scripted question.

Lan shakes her head a half-beat left, then right, short-huffs: " _They_ seem to do all the talking!"

_Obvious_. It's Monday and he's at it again. Clever as he is, Xer came for each weekend show. "What's it like without her?"

Now, that question seems so full, almost like tripping a confession: _Why'd you kill her, bud?_

It was all there when she wasn't.

Xer's confidence as a sleuth is building.

Priscilla walks into the bar - not having noticed its name - walks like she's never been here before. So, she wasn't. Not the Priscilla Young so closely watching her roommate, imitating her moves, finding a booth not too dark, somewhat close to the Ladies Room, not too far from the dance floor. "When in trouble, dance!"

Dancing, Sips of alcohol. An occasional cigarette. "New Truths" was how all the once forbidden "Old Truths" were re-formulated. Not that the revelations of "The Latter Days" were denigrated. No, as theologians have all worked through the centuries: "What is revealed is true. Our understanding of truth is what is ongoing revelation." Bottom-line: "When you Ascend, there is no Sin."

Q: "But how do we know we're Ascended?"

A: "You don't sin." Straight-lipped, chuckling inside, delivering the "Pearls" as straight-man.

March had walked away from his bottle - abandoned it sitting on the battered coffee-table; not caring whether his roommate would seduce it, ravish it.

Walking into "Moroni's" was the stuff of habit. He wasn't even lining up his drinks: another habit. He just couldn't be alone. Alone, he couldn't move. Was paralyzed.

_Something's missing_. How many times did he check his heart-beat?

Stan: "Scotch?"

Xer watches her. She simply "a looker": one of many. Nice size, nice shape, stylish: sits and chatters and jostles and plays: a peck on the cheek, a quick feel, a sliding away gambit ... like dealing cards: she's playing the game, but risking nothing: "House always wins!"

Acting like the Smithy she is!

March's hand was strangle-hold on the base of the fifth: scotch - not the issue: it was like crushing a guy's balls, that ultimate revenge: _grab a guy by the nuts, crush 'em! slice off his dick and stick it in his mouth - his buddys will get the message_!

Three guys. Three girls. Six nuts: he's cracking them all.

"Hey!" Attention-getter but also concern-for-a-regular: "Hey, March, what's happening?"

He followed her home by not following. He simply went directly there. Obvious: to _Smith_. Three dorms: he checks her out as young - Lacy Lily's a new act: freshman!

Beside a tree: in a shadow: Lily's one and only routine was always at 7 p.m.: been there since eight ... not looking, not counting them off, not jotting notes: _Nothing!_ : three girls - _It has to be her_. Intensity. Two: a chatterer; one moving as if floating on air: not her. _Her_ : walks like an every-day girl: a Good Girl: one others would say "Obviously, not her!"

March stood before her and everywhere she looked blood burst and spewed from his body. He had wanted to stand there: to arrive like a thunder-bolt: to shatter their "small world" of "panty-banter" - knowing what these guys were saying, doing: he could see them slipping a thumb, an index-finger, tugging the elastic waist-band ... to explode upon the scene: spit fire, eject fiery-balls from his eyes, slash with swords which cut, slice, maim, hack off the limbs of these: all these his Enemy!: foolish men - _Boys!_ \- daggers palmed; fingers into fist - a bludgeoning sledge-hammer cracking skulls ... but it isn't this at all: nothing he could control: as if, once there, she plays him like a puppet, puts him on display: humiliates him.

What did they say? _March was crying?_ No. Never. "Not March!"

Standing there: a wilted stalk of flesh. Starved due to lack of rain. Weeping. Not just drunk-weeping. What others could accept: "Guy was totally rocked out of his mind - whatja'ca expect?

Tears which totally baffled the sextet. _Who knows this guy?_ flashes between them? The guys know March - everyone knows March! - but the girls?

Priscilla: "He's scary!"

The three slide, slither, slink, sluice away ... walking ever too quickly: with clownish pace, striding with all their might, until they espy the high iron crest, gateway to _Joseph Smith Seminary_.

Xer catches them as they de-compress back to breathable space, a safe space: no crying men around: the one just waves goodnight and heads away; Lan presses the elevator button: "Who was that guy?" Priscilla: with total sincerity of fear: "What did he want?"

March was easy catchings for two hot Cat sisters. They took him off-campus, promising to give him the time of his life, _to so whack your doodle you'll never fall for a Smithy, again_ , run him around and up and down: but it was for themselves that they took him: "March Forbar." Just to say that he's firked you made some guys back away. "Whack your doodle doodle-do!"

# CHAPTER G

Xer wants it to be true: _Just one look!_ He desires, no, is driven, compulsed; it assaults his every thought and feeling - "I must look," stated once but resounding in and through every motion he makes, he took that night. _She leaves. He follows_

No woman had ever treated March _that way_. But what "that way" was, is what is killing him. He has no avenue of attack: _immobilized_. He could take anything else. Blocked at the scrimmage line. Tagged out at home. Pinned with the first flip. Anything but "that way."

It's not just anger. He knows his anger. It's not just rage. He has raged. It's not just humiliation. He's too confident to be humiliated - such is a social emotion. He could fuck her; that's not it. _What?_

_I adore her_. This is felt thought; not heard words; no clear inner articulation. It is his knees which want to bend. It is the air around her which he wants to kiss. It is a sin, so he knows. A Capital Sin: _idolatry_ , nothing less.

March has knelt before Mary. _Mary, Mother of God._ He knew he was supposed to be impressed. That looking into her _Pieta_ eyes; into her uplifted agony at the foot of The Cross; into her ethereal holiness as she was Assumed ... but it never took. He couldn't feel her. Had no problem with the counsel: "Mary is not a Goddess. She is not to be adored. Just revered." Reverence was a quickly sloughed-off emotion.

_Adoration_. It had never really been real to him. So, how would he know? Could he?

_The Box_ was destroyed that night. Guys flipping out everywhere. The walls were pounded with bottles, chairs, a guy's head - berserk. The only word. _Lily's driving them berserk!_

He showed up at four in the morning. He didn't know why. He, almost, couldn't remember how. As if his alarm had wailed and he jumped to: "Emergency Quarters!"

There is some fog. He likes that. He feels like that. An ancient movie he saw: forlorn lovers meeting in the fog; the fog consuming them - it had made him hot: _Why?_ Cranked off some heady stuff that night.

_Now._ Now is the iron-gate of _Joseph Smith_. He feels its iron. That he can't go in. That he is being stopped. But it's okay. His own training - "You're Catholic" - and he learned the rules, the customs, the procedures. "The Mormons need us. We don't know why. That is not important. It is God's Will. We are the "remnant." The _anawhim_. They are deluded. They believe they are approaching an Ascension. Blasphemy! Sacrilege! _Beware_."

So, like others, he had come to the gate, but never entered. Actually, it dawns on him as he waits, he's never really wanted to enter - doesn't even now. Is content to wait. Never before had a _Smithy_ interested him that much. But here he is: _waiting_. It seems okay. The fog comforts him.

_What was it tonight that she hadn't done before?_ If bedlam had not ensued, maybe he would have reflected on that. But bedlam did ensue. It wasn't just the fights. It was sexual havoc. Just like a scene from Dante - the film seen, the book not read - there was fucking all about. Men and girls. Men and men. Women and women. Groups. Singles. Loners. And it seemed not to stop. Like everyone was "on," hot: _Can't stop!_ \- that's what Xer grasps: he can't stop, no one can stop ... how did it stop? He can't figure. Just finds himself lying across some broad's ass when all of a sudden he becomes conscious: at least aware of what's happening. Air thick with human smell: at once fetid, at once intoxicating. Bodies piled; no other word for it. Moans, groans, snores and the melody of retching and curses. _Berserk. Bedlam._ "Did I look?"

"March." Not a question. Not a hail. Almost an order, a command. For she appears, apparitionally: all at once through the gate and keeps walking as he falls in with her: beside, almost lockstep, and within a short time - _just breaths?_ \- they are back at his place: two luminescent trails in the fog - from here to there: there being not even so much his place as their presence: at once he pours some wine, she lights a cigarette, they offer themselves, lips to lips: of glass to glass: tipping their blood: sipping: it is the magical moment, for he has no self-control, he has no self-awareness: it is _their_ awareness, _their_ self-control: two bodies merging, slipping into each other, drifting through each other: her not slipping off her skin but rather peeling his: unadorning him, lifting off his shirt as if uncovering a lost treasure; loosening his trousers; untying his shoes: it is a singular motion of fascination - each action is one of intrigue, she discovering, but more, he discovering: _being discovered!_ \- it is a thrill beyond his eyes, more than he can breathe: _rapture_ ... fly free her blouse, her skirt, her hose: a painter stroking the canvass, so does her body become palette for him: taking her breasts and washing across the canvass of their common desire: herself as moon and stars, the heavens: all gasp of blue and grasp of night: she the night for him - as he touches her, holds her, fondles her, so is he no longer seen, not by himself, rather by her: she is Night seeing him as he is without Sunlight - _Ravished!_ \- in the unspeakable part of himself, so is the word spoken, proclaimed .... a word with which she sucks the marrow of his warrior soul: like a sword the word beheads him - him as Enemy, as the one who seeks to ravish her: as he has been trained - to capture her and bind her with his flesh, to pierce her with his cock, to subdue her, submit her, to stab her so that she surrenders!

Ravished!

They burned _The Box_. "They"? Someone. Or, all of them? But it burned to the ground. Nothing left. _Lily is gone!_ Consumed?

She plucks his sword. Holds it high. Slams it down upon the rock of his skull: it shatters!

Only he knows where Lily is. Who Lily is! Xer sets siege outside the gateway to _Smith._

He has died. Why do they know this? Not him. But, yes, _I am dead_. As body, he knows this: knows it in "the Biblical sense of knowing" - now, that phrase from _Theology 101_ coming back to him; back as knowledge: _erotic_. How else? "As Adam knew Eve," so it taunts him, laughs at him ... _consoles_ him.

For she is dead. So, he knows. So, she knows he knows. So, he knows she knows ... _Ah!_ erotic knowing: that of _Coupling_ : of _The Embrace_ ... a knowing of _Embrace_ : this which is grasped: that _The Embrace_ is how s/he is now alive; lives; is present. Not as one but as one who is two.

She kills him as she plucks his sword: grasped his penis and adored it. Breathed upon it. Sucked it high and hard and conjured it as stone. An obelisk which she endows with her heartbeat. Coming unto him as she slipped into him through serpentine adoration. Twining around his cock. Being the wind and a flame to his Pillar of Fire: his sacred totem! _She laughs as she seduces him._

_Seduced_. What he does as he adores her: this the thrill which eggs him on. The trade he makes with all he knows he is losing, giving up, surrendering. Feeling himself as Seducer. Tricking her. Luring her. Having her step in a faulty manner, so that she falls into the pit of his soul: the soul of the Warrior. _Christus Victor!_ As all Cats knew: _know_ : one must Fall before they Rise!

She sucks him. His juices flow. More, they never stop flowing! _Flow_. This is the Seduction. Each to the other. Each as the other. _Flowing_. Neither could care to describe the mechanics; to sift through a conscious reduction of the experience: no, once it happened - _It is_! - her fingers loosening his balls, rolling them, frictionless with desire, setting them off into _Perpetual Motion:_ a never-ending generation of sperm: endless ejaculation! - _Ah!_ Warrior Paradise: Ejaculation Without End. _Amen_.

In her mouth: not being mouthed - becoming mouth: flowing inside her, flowing down her throat, into her belly, entering her bloodstream: beating as her heart - a union, a _Communio_ n, a common breathing, an ecstatic consummation: _Eaten and Eating_ : as One, as Host.

Ejaculating and ejaculated: a puddle, a pool, a stream of sperm: laid before her, lying before her: full body prone as a single sperm adoring her: spreading her body as he washes himself across her belly, down her thigh, hiking, running, jumping, parachuting, burrowing into her: beach, delta, cave, hungering mouth: kissing - adorational kiss: licking her, spreading her lips and plunging deeply into her, not just tongue but _Tongue!_ \- a madness of himself which she is seducing as more than himself: more than his bodily parts, so is this adoration: more than her bodily parts: so is this seduction ...

Ravished. Adored. Consummated.

Painted. Imagined. Created.

: _flowing_ \- ebb and eddy: he at the gate; she walking back through the gate.

"What's keeping her?"

Should I wait any longer?

When she turns as her _Hello_ and _Good Night_ it is her face: dappled, fog-droplets, a misty veil baring moonbeam eyes: pearly blue.

Her!

Not as he knows her, but as he knows himself, so is Lily present.

"Lily." Whispered. More in hope or more in fear? Touches her shoulder.

She turns.

"Excuse me?"

Xer's eyes burn: no, is it her eyes burning through me?

He sees himself like a small sheet of paper curling edges as it disappears into smoke.

# CHAPTER H

" _Milites Christi_. Through Confirmation you become Soldiers of Christ." _But I don't have my sword, anymore!_ is what he wanted to say, but he was too busy chuckling at himself. Too busy trying to stay stuck _back then_ : back there, with her: _flowing_.

Excuse me.

It's a mistake. Oh, I'm sorry. His tongue couldn't form those words.

Excuse me. I mean, it's me, not you. Her eyes said that.

He felt like nothing. Totally and completely nothing. Fully nothing.

_You are my all!_ screamed at him from her soul.

How could he fit all this into a logical world? A framework with boundaries? It seemed so fluid: in every conceivable sense - even the streets flowed, like the canvasses of the Surrealists and the iconic Dali: never before grasping what appeared as "silly": _Watches flopping around like gooey gum:_ now, his world is like that - _Is hers?_

He knows that she is not Lily. Her eyes say, "Not me!" But, then, she is. All that it took was this _one look_ : flashing between them, and they like the flash - a bolt, a stream of light which instantly is, changes them, alters them; she not pausing in the slightest to appraise the defects of his flesh and bony-structure: he, Xer, a spit of sperm who became a spit of male, never to manly stature: now, her, all that which made them go berserk, right there: he does not know her name, but, he does: _Priscilla_ \- "Priscilla Young," she says after "Excuse me" ... or somehow it went: who knows? who cares?... he was her first and her last: as it should be, as it always is: virgin unto virginity: no longer maiden virgin, now womanly virgin: truly Goddess.

March accepts her as "Lan. Actually, Lillian. But only my Mom and Dad call me that." Yet, he knows her true name: _Priscilla_. He doesn't understand how. He certainly can't get his mind to even imagine asking _Why?_

_I am No-Name_. This is what he wants to shout. _I am All-Name!_ He is excited. He is terribly confused. He doesn't know sleep from day-wake.

She's as he is: only sad at what she knows _they_ are not.

Priscilla yields to him, surrenders, submits: imagines herself being turned inside out - laughs at the banana being peeled, but so it is! _Ascension! Glorious Ascension._

It was the look she got from her. This now Lily knows. _The look_ which even Priscilla, so she is sure, didn't know then: _Must know now?_

They hadn't seen each other - _How long?_ ... Each was simultaneously asking this question. Sharing this question as their first common bond: each knowing now the purpose for their meeting, for their rooming together: _Ascension._

It had happened to them. Had it happened to many? Not a question given life, because all around them confirmed the New Reality, the New Truth.

Lily kisses March. _Poor soul_ , is her compassionate good-bye. Yet, she knows that he lives within her. Is her. That it is he whom she will carry into _The Embrace_ of every other man, every other male: whether in flesh or soul: whether in femininity or masculinity.

Priscilla kisses Xer. _Salvation_. Conveyed through the twinkle in her eye. Will he eventually Ascend? Such, she instantly knows so rightly he will not. Why? She knows not. Turns and walks on the same street, in the same city, state, country, planet ...but then not: _Ascended_.

# CHAPTER 17

When they woke, the girls were not surprised to see the boys. Zav and Mark rubbed their eyes, then slightly shook their heads side-to-side, a wake-up routine in tandem. The girls were amused. The boys glance at each other: _What?!_

Four beds. Tastefully decorated room. The Early-Temple-Revival movement in decorating was apparent. Each liked it. But after a quick scan, all were eager to talk - not necessarily listen; talk.

" _Bad_! _Bad_! _Bad_!" - the flourish of robes, the suddenness of appearance - yet, not "Deacon!" as in the previous Deacon but as in her voice; ("Auntie?!")

It was then that the boys truly awoke. "Attention!" All the females giggled, sillily and delightedly.

"Is this what _Coupling_ is about?"

"About?!" in that egging-on _About what?_ tone: Deacon.

She checks-off each face. Hesitancy.

There is only one way - but it will have to wait. For now, clarification.

_We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam's transgression_. What does that mean to you now?

Not even one iota thinking that the girls had not been _the girls_ , Zav kicks-off: "It doesn't. Didn't mean anything to Xer, so ...?"

Lil: "Why do you think you were Xer?"

(Consternation.)

"Okay. Keep it simple. Let's just assume the algebraic transference: x is x and y is y." _Deacon_.

"But," and she stops, bites her lower lip, asks, but is not looking at Deacon, not directly responding to the last statement, "But, it was what made the Ascension happen. Wasn't it?" and she plows on, talking a stream: Cilla: "Like we're here, right here, because something _didn't_ happen back then. Isn't that it?" Keeps rowing: " _They_ were real. We are real. _They are real._ That's it!"

Deacon wanted to applaud, but holds back.

"So, _women_ won't be punished for Adam's transgression?"

Mark: "Women didn't sin!"

Can't be.

Has to be.

Should it be?

Want it to be?

Deacon let them go. Not that they were on a schedule, just that it was fitting. Words had failed as they so often do before the experience is fully measured. _Off they go!_ to herself; envying them; envy laced with fear: _For all of us!_

Their _Coupling_ ceremonies followed shortly thereafter. They were "Back from Africa!" before anyone of their classmates truly accepted that they had left school. None even considering that they had been drafted: certainly not among the girls. Timewise it was two months: "Just on break," is how it was explained. And so it seemed: even to them.

_Coupling_ ceremonies were very private events. They were public in knowledge, so there were many gifts. But they were restricted in liturgy: only family members present - and even this was limited to no more distance than first cousins.

It was private because _Coupling_ was a private time. Family time. Spousal time. You and me time. Lovers' time. The timefulness of all Time.

Of the many customs and rites, "Naming" was the most weighty. For as long as it took - sometimes a full week! - they spent time in a small but quite comfortable apartment. Each time they saw each other they addressed the other with their name: she calling him Lilith; he calling her Zav; Mark and Cilla/Cilla and Mark.

It was a naming in the minutest of details. "Mark, please pass the salt." "Mark, please pick up the soap!" And so on.

Some imaged it as a watering rite. Where the other became known as one knows a waterfall he or she stands under. Drop by drop but really the full plunge felt. So it was with the name. Syllable by syllable but yet the whole story. Seeing the other. Looking at him or her and them being you as you name them and in the naming so transferring your own perception of who you are _as if you were actually the other so named!_

It became tedious.

It became humorous.

It became mindless.

It is magical.

More, there is always more to the magical. As they prepare for sleep so they look, stare, jettison their eyes as they do their names: Zav/Lil/Mark/Cilla ... and transfer their dreams. Dreams which are, customarily, not by necessity brought to light. No need to chat in the waking time, more, the openness to transfer, and the transference effected by the Naming.

But, here, with these who had been to Africa!

"March." She looks at him. The word fraught with misery.

"Prissy." He cannot say more.

"Xer." There are tears in her eyes.

"Lily." Exhausted. Spent.

_Deacon to Deacon_ : More than ever we must pay Attention to these four. We must Intend as we have never Intended before! ... Have what they've dreamed already enabled us to do that? .... How else but to try? ... How else, indeed?

("Ascension results from Attention and Intention, _but not necessarily_." A First Truth addressing the interpretation of a New Truth, which is now an Old Truth.)

Their Naming, then, was unlike any Naming, ever. It rocked and pummeled _The Embrace_ as no Deacon could remember: not forgetting individually, collectively nor communally. Though such had been foretold within their own dreaming: a dreaming which was for them - those who Ascended from the _Communio_ to blossom as _The Embrace_ \- a dreaming which was for them tumescent: fullness beyond borders: of time, space, dimension: yet, limited in a way, a way which tantalized them, tempted them, but did not appear to them - for which reason these four are named beyond Naming.

: _beyond_ – as dreamers beyond; beyond being just one or two, even four; beyond into that dreaming which is _The Embrace_ : nothing now of themselves which isn't beyond.

Lilith pleasured in being called "Zav." It brought to her the full gasp of his maleness. For each time he named her, so she knew his name - and so knew him. Not only as Zav in his peculiarity as poet, but him as every other male he had become and let become him. When he touches her, her skin becomes water. They seep into each other. She gives him "Lilith," and he becomes every woman she has ever let herself be. This the reward of _Courting_. Of the _Cauldron_. Of Tag Teams. One name, but a thousand, a million, beyond star-numbered identities: each with a panting breath; each with a pleasure riddled with hope, fear, ecstasy beyond what she or he had ever known.

Yet, what these four must Name is also March and Priscilla and Lillian and Xer. Of dreams incomplete. Of Ascensions not Ascended. Of identities unidentified. Of such is _why_ _The Embrace_ fluxes in full panic: _ecstatic panic_.

They are Coupled. Each plunging into a life of singular Attention and Intention. Each so Named that they are now One Name. One Name as Ascended: seeking to fully realize their Ascension as they now become Family: _nucleoid_.

As Couples, they join their neighborhood. Drive up. Move furniture. Cut the grass. Shovel the snow. Gather for block parties. A neighborhood as neighborhoods have been for millennia.

But, it is them as neighbors - these four: which is their true neighborhood, one which only they could define and compose. "Africans" - if the word had any common play, which it didn't. So, they did not speak about it: they simply - _Simply?!_ \- set out dreaming.

"What do you bring that we do not already know?"

"That it is not finished."

For the first time ever, ever in anyone's knowing, there was a dumbfoundness as bond within _The Embrace_.

It happened as only it has been happening: they Embraced. Linked not just in body, the ties of flesh: rope of tongues, strings of fingers, wrappings of thighs, bows of cock and pussy, all this, but in spirit: opening their astral selves for permeation; setting all in inter-coupledness and meditating: drawing their souls close to one another - _risking_.

_Not finished._ Grasping in the "not" that something else was finished. That there was still in them _fear_. That inexplicable something which is preventing the Final Ascension.

"We knew it would not be automatic."

"That merely re-forming the time and the dimension was not the answer."

"Did we?" A harshness which evokes this vibrant fear.

"How do we know - _now?_ \- that we are truly _Embrace_? Not still _Communio_. Not even still - _ah, it is fear, I truly fear_ \- not even still just the Council of Twelve?"

"Are we no further than our primordial ancestors? No Ascensions? No New Truths?"

Fear.

Having done all they had ever done, knew ever to do: emptied themselves into and through the other: _kenosis_ : offering even this fear so as to move beyond - hoping for a beyond.

"Lily is Priscilla is Lily."

"March is Xer is March."

"They do not know this."

"It's not in their knowing."

"It's our knowing."

"What have we done?"

"Descended so as to Ascend."

"Or, was the Descension an Ascension?"

"Yet, not the Final Ascension?"

" _Still._ "

# CHAPTER 18

The four didn't formally discuss "Africa." Though intensely aware of the quickening of _The Embrace_ , though flashing on _Courting_ events in memory and bits of conversation, though aware that the world they live in is much like the world they have always lived in: each being like the other a product of a Happy Home, of a neighborhood which knew no poverty, no joblessness, one which would not even be able to comprehend the unthinkableness of homelessness - being a time, a period, a wave in the quantum where such negatives of materiality did not exist; not knowing that they even once existed, for such as "evil" was not discussed as they grew: dreamed as only few, Deacons foremost, who had known - and who, once _The Embrace_ blossomed, made it real that such was not a foremost idea, notion, concept nor reality of any moment either personal or public: dreamed it, but _as not_ ... though aware as such, as such forgetting.

Day in, day out: the foursome were as forgetful of "Africa" as they were mindful of it; not avoiding its sound, hearing the word "Africa" bandied about as it had always been, but not letting it do more than forget them. And as _The Embrace_ desired, so it was: for _The Embrace_ desired that all who Couple do so forget.

Forget what they had learned, had become during _Courting_. And it was of such a moment and such a weight that once Coupled, scarce words were ever spent recalling _Courting_. Though _Courting_ was everywhere: as foil, as backdrop, as contrast, as diving board - "Walla-walla-walla" the flapping board wobbles to a steady state: _the diver as flung._

As individuals of every period: cosmic, historic, psychological, fantastic; of every dimension: here, there and not-anywhere-but-now, such individuals were only barely aware of their individuality, in fact, individuality being, as those once blossomed dreamed, being only because of the forgetfulness of the common, the communal, the collective: more than We and Us - that terrible Ground of Being, so dark that it was all light, so thick that it was thinner than air, as weighty as a vacuum, and as such the throbbing flesh of any moment - _Whew!_

_Terrible_. It was the transition word. The one word which they were taught to image, to meditate upon, so that individuality would happen. " _Coupling_ is Terrible!" Scarce knew the Courters what this could mean, but it rushed goosebumps up and down, in and out, around and over every patch of flesh, stiffened every follicle, trembled every breath. _Coupling will be Terrible!_ Why did it fascinate?

"Terrible!"

_Terrible_.

:he to she and she to he:

Some during _Courting_ , early on, feinted away. That's how they phrased it, "feinted away." Meaning, two spent more time together than the others should have allowed. Yes, the responsibility of the others, not your own. So it was known to them: that it happened is just that it happened. _Why?_ \- no one posed. Actually, the simple fact - if Zav had taken the time to consider it, to swish it around in his poetic mind: to discern the play of _is_ and _is-not_ : but he didn't; doesn't - the simple fact is that Courters were too busy giving rein to every impulse to every desire to every pleasure that they just didn't take the time: "Don't have time!" if it had to be said; not time to dally, be alone; only to practice the whispered arts of _Coupling_ : focusing in on just one, no, "Hell no!" and a behind was slapped, a bra strap flipped like snapping a rubber band, three fingers wilding about the ball-field ... yes, there were some who dallied, but others soon found them out, flushed them out, rolled them over and rousted their _Courting_ spirits: everyone had had such a moment, maybe a handful of such moments, normally in the last year - each of the four would have something to say about this, but: _Who's asking?_

_Terrible_ : because it was turning-everything-inside-out; that painful; that perplexing; that astounding: astounded that it could be done, that they - each one, did have this individuality, not as self-knowledge, rather, as being known by the other. All through _Courting_ one was urged, prodded, taught, encouraged, motivated - to know the other through an-other: _other_ \- a capital sense, but it was the way to "know thy presence." Such was all that the youths had known. From their earliest years, "The Other reveals your presence." No capital for one's presence; no capital I, though I was capital ... such linguistic trivia was nothing but the lid on desires, and they had desires: to go out, to take in, to eat, to consume, to lick, to be licked - _ha!_ it never took their teachers long to train such pubes in the arts of _Courting_. Not a moment's length to have them itchy to jump up out of their chairs and start doing: _"Have all through others having all!"_ The sensate thud of _all_ stirred them: "All having you to have their own presence!" Cock by being all cocks: cocking a pussy which is all pussy - instant insight; instant ignition: "Stay!" as in stay-put - _ha!_ \- even in the far-reaches of the galactic stretch it was known that the young of all stripes had the pulse, and that the pulse throbbed: _All living is throb._ An invocation which drew not critical reflection, just reflex utterance.

So, the _inside-out:outside-in_ : "You are all. All is within you." But then the terrible difference: "You are all you have." Here, catching right from the start that the subject "you" and the object "you" are at once yourself and your spouse: thus the phrasing of _Coupling_.

"There are _not_ others." Once Coupled - so he and she jotted down furiously, stabbing at their notebooks with uncontrollable energy: it was clear, Once Coupled that it is the You which is I which is We.

Terrible!

# CHAPTER 19

It was like showing. How it had come to her, came to be her handle. That she was "showing." That, for some reason, this showing was necessary. Certainly, no doubt that it was needed. That _they_ all needed it.

All they needed were her pearls.

For as she moves about: sliding at times, scraping a soft foot one after the other; at times a hip-hop beat of her thighs and a jump - any movement: so that all her body parts moved: her hands swayed, swaying out her inner heart, her heart towards them; her torso flexing, almost as if in flight, up she goes, a dancing prance, breasts jiggling: just that lift and fall of a jiggle which she knew was a rocket-lift and a fire-spewing fall for many of them; not ever needing to think about them, about their hands, their howls, their flicking tongues; not having to sit where they sit, though she does sit where they sit when her showing is over, but it is not her sitting there with them when she is showing, so, she just shows, trusting in her showing: trusting the fiery rope which lashes her pussy to her astral eye: trusting such seeing: _Showing sees!_ \- how could she ...? _but she doesn't._

("Lily?")

Lilith laughs: hand to her mouth: suffocated laughter.

_Showing._ Zav has been sitting for "a long time": this phrase feeling itself all over him: hands across his eyes: "seeing" her, blindly, there across the table: candle-lit, scent of garden-cuts in vase, thick of smell and thick of her: sniffing was easy: from a distance - "action at a distance!" - sniffing and knowing her; licking was no trouble - "You lick so close you can't see!" Such was both explanation and indictment. He condemned himself: "No courage there!"

_Showing_ : herself in the flinging of this and the frolicking about discharging that: hats and sweaters, socks and undies, earrings, rings, even make-up: all flung -- "Am I naked, yet?" It made him laugh. She laughed.

_Showing_ : both knew that this was it. "It." _It._ Not a how can we see it or be it or have it; no, it was the doing: almost like a violation, an offense, an act of violence -- but such was lacking in their vocabulary; that it why it was so Terrible: the knocking on the knobless, keyless, boulder-solid door -- but not to knock, for they knew what the knock was: gentleness, a gentle lifting of an eyelid .... _"Just one look!"_ ... Whose brain rattled with that phrase? Whose inner ear heard that tune? Whose forgetfulness was betrayed at this moment?

Can we pause to laugh at this moment? We or you or I who are _The Embrace_. Or, beyond _The Embrace_. Or, before _The Embrace_? ... Only whatever it is because of this pause. Here wherein all that is and was and shall ever be is created. Here, me seeing you and you seeing me. This our first sight of ourselves as individuals. Here, Coupled.

Lilith's hands drift away. Not by volition. Not by gravity. Not by desire.

Zav's hands drift away. By volition. By gravity By desire.

For all that she is, he is not; he is, she is not.

_Terrible_. Not describing the wordlessness of this instant. Yet, describing everything around it. Catching in its sound and its rhythm and its ceaseless cascading of things upon thing and emotions after emotions, as ever both describing as it defines the loop which their flesh now is drawn out to be, the flesh of their gaze, the blood of their look, the cold fury of their ravenous craving for the other: for in him she sees herself and in her he sees himself: not other; not others; not an-other; not even I or me or _moi_ or ego: for it is a fullness so cored by emptiness that it is beyond feeling: it is _Terrible!_

"Brown eyes."

"Mellow tone."

"A child tall."

"A woman full."

When categories were to be filled, those of bodily description, _everyone_ filled them the same - since there were no such categories! _Only_ cosmetic accessories.

( _"Green eyes!"_ )

( _"Bullshit!"_ )

If the Deacons had pressed it, they would have heard about the "oddities" of March and Priscilla and Xer and Lily. But they didn't. Not for the moment, anyway.

Now, it was for the _Coupling_ to create the categories for themselves.

This a spousal art: noticing the little things; detailing those slightest of differences of one's Beloved. They termed it, "Caring." The discipline of erotic Attention.

"You've such a delightful roundness," as she carefully, with the lightest of fingertip press, circles his right eye-socket.

She doesn't have to say: for it is her playfulness with his eyebrows which lets him know that they fascinate her. Hairy lines on his face which he has never paused to consider: just hair, like his beard - but all males had hair and all have beards! so, why would he have said anything?

"Your chin," but it was a chin like a thousands chins; as his skin was like everyone else's skin, even like hers: "Mellow tone" is how it had been taught, and then not mentioned; not needed at this moment in time, not needing to know: so _The Embrace_ : that there once had been other than "Mels."

Hours. Days. What was _Coupling_ time: _longing_.

Zav longs for Lilith.

Lilith longs for Zav.

When apart it is longing filled with a focusing upon the spouse: a doodle of the fall of her hair: red, like all females are red, but his catching that glint of light which he claims, swears, stands up boldly at bed's edge and proclaims: "Light halos you!"

Longing which suffers, but a pleasured suffering: glutted suffuse of the presence of spouse.

She visioning his stride as she sits at her workplace. Works but is ever practicing Attention and Intention. This their playfulness. This their Coupled eros. Intending the other. Having them here as you; not just as if you, but _as you_. The reach of his arm is the liquid thrust of her arm towards the coffee pot. The smile upon a welcoming is his smiling greeting her at day's end.

_Intending._ What in _Courting_ had prepared them for this feast? This a thought only cast about within the dreaming of _The Embrace_.

_Everything_ was erotic _Coupling_ ; everything now a play of creative fire: each creating the other and so one's self. This being true, yet, it was the physical _Coupling_ , the genital linking, the flesh clung which was most Terrible!

Terrible: as the wink.

Linked together. Cock gloved by cunny. Facing each other. Hands alive, active, searching. Eyes closed. Eyes wide-open. Tongues celebrating, sucking in, leaving soul-full tracks. A feverish _Coupling_. Hot. So trembling hot that the coldness of desire was seething.

Wink.

Maybe _The Embrace_ is cognizant; _maybe_

Wink.

("Just one look!")

Terrible.

Just that they knew. In that knowing which is almost speech. That knowing so dumb that one is about to launch out into eloquent sound. Yet, so garbled that only the crooner hears the tune.

She saw him there. In the peering he was there.

He was peering. In being seen he is here.

Wink.

He peers her there. In the peering she was there.

She peered. In being peered she is here.

Her body which had been flooded; always present to the flooding: she so rightly Courted. Rightly and fittingly she who was every _her_. This flush of memory was in the Moment. It throbbed through the Moment: more an event than a feeling, this throbbing: imaging a flurry of spitting foam waves crashing the beach's edge and the crash is at once a peeking unto the ocean's depthlessness: _Wink_.

His cock. It fitted into her cunny. There, the cave and he was the ship seeking a safe haven. A cock which was a third hand, of one-finger: but as if a thousand hands as it slips inside her and puts her on as if glove. Being a wand; magical: a magic which is her, for it was nothing, almost non-existent until she came, just a sigh from her, _even an imagined one!_ , just a sigh and this cock is the Pole of the Universe: of hardest steel, of soundest wood - "Tree of Life!" .... now, in a wink, it roots in her eye: astral eye: Third Eye: fiery eye: (" _Bad_ Eye!") ... now, in a wink, she wears _him_ as glove. _Wink._

The comfort which was "the boys," "the gang," "the team" -- he couldn't deny the moments of those feelings. Seeing them all and knowing that they'd get them all: all laid and creamed and rammed and jammed and flipped and flopped and .... sweating, flinging the sweat from one's brow, feeling the sweat of the other's: men: males: bodies which were flags of flesh, launching pads of jazz, flinging, flying, splotching and splattering jazz ... every part of himself which was himself was so because he was them: the sperm united them, bonded them, was them casting themselves before the other: sperm which was the other as only sperm can be: for from it would come, so they had been taught, boys like themselves: it was for them to scatter these seeds and the more scattered so the greater hope of life-everlasting. In the fuck and the bang, so was the _fuck!_ and the _bang!_ ... now, in a wink, _she_ came all over him, soaked herself throughout him, plowed him like a flower-bed being turned, rocketed him with her blasting cock: spewing fire from that of her which winked .... _he winks back._

# CHAPTER 20

Mark and Cilla were in tandem with their now forever foursome. Realizing this play in the cosmic dance was nothing but as easy as grasping the fundamental Rules and protocols of _Coupling_ as they had as singles grasped all that _Courting_ is.

Not that it became a topic for dinner-time discussion. No, they quickly came into the play of "Four-square" as it was tagged, into that dynamic which ensured each a reflective point, this being the other of one's gender, and a compassionate buffer, this being the other not-one's-gender.

Lil would cut a diagonal and triangulate with Cilla about "them." This being the men in their lives, "Males!" An exasperated point reached after many an event: being abandoned for the _de rigor_ male bonding at any lumen screeching with cheers and the jiggles of Courtly young "things" - "Ain't she some _thing_!" A phrase not intended to be heard, not in that it was not forwarded for comment, but said self-absorbedly loud enough that the girls, women, females -- all also of the nature of that _thing_ \-- heard clearly no matter in what other room in the house they sequestered themselves. That plus a range of habits and customs which were never detailed during _Courting_ classes: the sonic toothbrush never re-set for her tenderness; the classic "Don't throw that away!" of digital fodder on their i-beam archiver; failing to appreciate the specialness of their heirloom china plates, treating them only as if Special Occasion paper! -- _Oh!_ exasperation at the minutiae of this thing called male.

For Mark and Zav, there was something about _Coupling_ which -- "Hades Fire! They're just so, so .... _expecting_." Zav blew out that word, relieved the pain it cut from his tongue with a swallow of lusty foamed ale, didn't even have to look aside towards Mark, both still eye-balled on the re-play, Mark losing, today, like he's never lost to Zav before: in itself enough irritation! .... "Expecting," both had heard it bandied about -- always out of sight of female ears -- and it worked for them. They had laughed. Slung arms around each other's shoulders. Pushed and shoved as they howled it, the howl being all that such howl has been for mythic eons: " _Expecting_. Prissy's sweet pussy, she expects, doesn't she?!"

It hit its mark: "What'd'ja say?" As if whacked upside the head, eye-balls jiggling, dimensions violated: _What?!_

Zav missed his own free-fall; his classic _vonnerguttian_ slip in time.

Nothing inside Mark wanted to hold onto it.

_Expecting_ echoed inside their collateral brains, memories: without even a wink, they stood in a bonded moment of eternity.

Expecting.

More than Attention. Even, Intention.

_Baffling_. In his mind when he thought about it, and he did think about it more than he'd like: thinking to himself -- "Like there's more." Seeing himself up from the bed, a bed which had just flowered with _good_ sex, amazing sex, indulgent sensuality: after two hours in the sack just paying Attention: noticing every part of her .... _practicing_ : they liked this word, "Want to practice?!" with a barely restrained blast of bared-teeth desire, this word "practice" was like the Perpetual Motion machine: it was always on, even when off!

They'd practice breathing. Lie. Sit. Spoon. Any position would do. All did: letting the sounds of their voices arrive in all their differentnesses: he with a deeper inhale and a nostril flaring exhale; she with the whisper which pursed into a stream of whistled sound, high pitched but soft, wafting; adjusting themselves, moving an arm, a leg, a hand "falling asleep" shaking it, maneuvering into those indefinable spaces of personal presence: feeling the current up and down the spine, trilling skin, which is each other's breath, feeling it, hearing it, responding to it as if dance, indeed, dancing: holding breaths like partners touching hands, fingertips, then an arm on a shoulder, and waltzing; this without a measure of time, not-measuring time being the discipline of the practice: eyes closed, eyes open, working only to see with the other's breath, trusting that the tempo will rise, the beat catch its rhythm, there, _together_ : Attending closely to the other, so close that it is Attending to one's presence ... deeply, slipping, imaging themselves as they have prepared, for preparation in "other time" was vital, that time for sharing images, stories, for summoning up the humor, from "Melons, I couldn't get past them as melons!" to the bawdy toilet jokes of those so yoked: "Farting like an Amateur Night jazz band!" "Oh, you mean, Uranus jazz, don't you?!" Stop. _Stop_. Stop! ... such a moment of practice, such a joyous plunge into the Well of Your Spouse: splashing about, swimming elegantly paired; all that, and he stands, rolled off the bed and stood up, stretched his yawning arms -- and then is arrested! "Halt!" did she yell that? "Stop, thief!" did she mean that? He had not to turn. He had not anything to do, for it was all about him, all the clothing he need ever put on: _Expecting_ \-- "What?!" he had first said, during those first months, "What's a matter, honey?" Learning shortly thereon never to even ask, for the tears, or the laughter, or the frigid stare -- "Jesus, _Zav/Mark/Any-Male_ , what does she _expect_?"

But the Four-square was more than simply Coupled banter and commiseration. For there was also an _Expectation_ which they shared: one less articulated, more a gnawing "something" none had a garrulous image for, something, at the least, felt, yet only once approached: "I had this dream ..." who had opened this up? _The Embrace_ quickly mis-directed this slipper: "This is not expected of you, _not now_ ," so the thought was emitted, shared, communicated: the other three almost say in sync, "Not now. No dreams!" not knowing why, just laughing and moving on to other matters, which, more than likely in these first years was about "Babies. Are you two picking out any names?"

For what they sensed -- long forgetting how they had sensed just the opposite during their months of first meeting \-- they sensed that they were Family. Obviously, not by blood. More jolting as it once dawns upon each of them, by soul, spirit, "As if we're on _this_ planet having Ascended from another!"

Zav and Mark didn't like the rightness of this feeling, even though they both admitted that they "believe Cilla's right about this." There was something, again, that gnaw of "expected," meaning, that "What are we _here_ to do?" was asked each to the other, finding a tenuous comfort in the fact that it was not just his alone but his and _his_ to figure out: "a brotherly quest, so to speak."

A feeling of Fate not incompatible with that of Divine Providence: that, possibly -- "Probably?" mulled Mark to himself -- he and she and him and her had been bonded in a sealed marriage in a former life, on a different planet; that their _togetherness is an Ascension?_

"I've asked, but no one can cite an Old nor a New Truth whether sealed spouses have knowledge of their past lives." _Is that necessary?_ Lil asks, silently.

So, "Four-square" was accepted by them, a phrase now precious, secretly uttered now and all throughout their _Coupling_ years, one that was, "Correct. It fits." Words which were heard upon waking; waking words which slithered away, soaked into their pillows: that sacramentum of dreaming.

_Coupling_. "All about family and babies. You'll catch on!" Scribbled on a small swatch of such pure white paper: so white that it called forth other words -- parchment, scroll, vellum: ancient words, words when paper was as revered as the simplest of glass is now ... small, but by its purity called all Innocent eyes to peer: and they peered: a handwriting which flowed, a flowing which rose up as if it had just kissed the paper ever so alightingly, ever so lovingly, ever so sensually, kissed and then flew away: words of Lovers' Flight: flying together; as they read the words, as they read and so arose, sailed: they knew it was a gift from the Deacons.

# CHAPTER 21

Their _Coupling_ went as other _Coupling_ s went, but _then not_. The _then not_ being the presence of _The Embrace_. For they not only Attended and Intended: two artful fulcrums of the practice: not only one-on-one, and not only the complement, at times the supplement, of the Four-square, but the _unknowing_.

It was _The Embrace_ unknowing. Boldly positioning itself to encounter, to accept, to be broken and humbled, to be salved and healed, in short, to be embraced by the embracings of these.

Yet, as embracing is, it was all a matter of being swept away by the forces, by The Force or That Force: call it a Swelling or an Emergence or a Throbbing, take whatever name, whatever capital, search the i-archives and take whatever label ... it was the abandonment of _The Embrace_ to its becoming not-Embraced: a _Coupling_ which, as had their _Courting_ , thrilled and chilled with _expectation_.

"Babies," is how Expectation came disguised to them.

"I want a thousand babies!" A statement which reminded Lillian how drunk Priscilla could get - and how nutso she got when drunk. _Amen._

"Sure, sweet girl, and I'll have a thousand more!"

But it was _there_. As _there_ as "getting there." Not as located on a specific map; not at least as they might have hoped, especially Mark. He wanted, needed specificity. Despite all the changes, he hadn't changed. "Who has?" went unasked.

Cilla knows where _there_ is. She knows that it is a moment, not a place. That it is a presence which once made present she might not recognize. She knew that it was a moment of dying.

Not just her own, his.

"The sperm dies as it impregnates the egg."

"Does the egg die?"

The females wait in terrified anticipation; the corpses of the males already discarded.

That they were unFixed was simply metaphor.

An Old Truth still New was that, "Souls choose you, not you, them."

Yet, it was New Truth that there were "souls" and there were "Ascended souls." The former were "first-timers." Absolutely new creatures. Never before alive. Drawn from the maw of oblivion. These could come at anytime, to anyone.

"Ascended souls," however -- and who did not believe themselves such? -- such souls, having the experience of life-already; having an spiritual awareness of the Eternal Play; having savored all that Eros could be; readied themselves for their next Ascension by choosing those who themselves had at least once Ascended.

_Babies_ , then, were "not made, they arrive."

Hmmmmm. Mark strokes his cock: "Delivery chute?" mocks him.

It was a practice to Attend to the Child's Presence. Here, Cilla has set the night. A fine meal. The Alaskan peppers he so adores. The purple vine of Mongolia which sets his eyes a-burning. The cool, slithering ices from the Yucatan ... these on which she slithers: carrying them in silver bowls, bowls aglow in her hand by candle-light: lights all about spraying the room with luring throbs: she with silver bow around her neck: a bow which worships her neck, is set in slooping splendor to mimic the elegant rise of her flesh, a rise which is snatched by kin silver earrings: this is all she is, nothing else: only flesh, flesh which becomes silver: mutates into this silvery flow, its fluidity, she moves like a wave towards him, bowls slightly cresting as her breasts rise as she floats towards him: all the humors and juices of the eaten meal transform into a single solid tangible teeth-clattering yearning on his part to rise and chomp on her! to stand and take her bowls, these offerings, to raise them and gobble them: with one smash into his chomp: obliterate them, suck all their cold passion and so set fire to his being: for she is just that, a fire to be set, and he, just that, kindling: his arms, his legs, his desire, all at "about to burst" as she, with a final step and stop next to him, comes into him as he inhales: the fragrance of her: almond: the flow of her: icy: the presence of her: _hungering_ ....

How could he or even if he could would he "get a handle on this?"

He hated his need to confess this before Zav. So, he doesn't.

He had taken her. After all, he had taken her so often now. How long, counts the newly Coupled? Where time is measured in markings of Copulation: measured and marked as one walks about the house: on top the dining room table; endless spots on the floor; out in the garage; under how many Moons in the back-yard, anon, anon .... _taken_ her: he had done it, and he had liked it: that final moment when, _Snatch!_ she's mine! ... the locating of her onto himself; moving her legs aside and plunging; rotating her around and settling her sumptuous butt down upon his lap -- "Polar delights!" so have the guys laughed; this "taking" so rightly felt as his, as his right, his way, how things should be: for he was the polar point, his was the compass needle, he was the Penetrator, the Warrior, the Adventurer, the one who goes Out and Forward and Up The Hill and _Charge! Charge! Charge!_

_Taken her._ And she had never complained. Maybe he felt Zav's "expectation," but Cilla wasn't as violent as Lilith "Violent," there was something seductive about that word and the image it re-vives, for he remembers what they have never spoken about, not her nor the Four-square: _that last Flow_.

But it is Cilla, at this moment, not Lil. For, for the first time, leaving him feeling queer, out of sorts, upside-down: for the first time he hears himself, "You got taken!"

_Shit_.

In almost exact duplication, as if following in their footsteps through the deep snow, Zav and Lil give birth to little ones every two years, doing so for a set of eight children. All just exactly one year to the month after their "cousins" the Riders.

But the symmetry was an illusion. One which kept _The Embrace_ in suspended expectation.

Lilith had seen _that_ glint in Priscilla's eyes. Known it the instant she caught it; knew it in the catching. That her sister was pregnant. That -- and of this she was certain \-- they had been caught by an Ascended soul. Lilith was quite pleased. She knew that she would have her work cut out for her: "No drinking until the baby comes, agreed?"

It was _that_ glint because, for the first time ever, Cilla laid in her arms. _Ah!_ There are moments of Goddessness which Lilith was willing to die eternally for. At such moments she became full to her Goddess presence. Here, now, because it was so for Priscilla. Possibly the first time ever for Priscilla: "I don't think I've ever Ascended," uttered, but lips closed by Lil's press.

Without that moment, Lil would not have known. Known about Mark, that is. Known that his was, indeed, a presence she had, herself, to birth. _But not now!_ resonates through her bones and flesh, heart and soul.

What was for _Now!_ was Zav. Somehow Lilith intuiting that hers was to be a step behind, not a lessening step, but one of tempo - behind her sister Cilla.

She had often slain him. Tricked him. Ambushed him. Raised him to mind-boggling and brain-deadening heights of pleasure and then slain him: him so goofy with seminal pleasures that he didn't even know that he had been so murdered!

But it was okay. _Acceptable_ , in her own thoughts.

At such moments, it also came back to her: _Bad_.

Here without an specific meaning, just her feeling: that Zav was not as duped, not as tricked, not as dead as she was leading herself to be, to accept.

For he did not die. She did not kill him. _Why, then, is it our shared fantasy?_

"Play with me!" Not a seduction from her; an invitation from him.

She took him up.

Literally. Physically. Metaphorically. Astrally. _It goes on!_

During _Courting_ they had been trained in "Adoration." He assembling words and images, he visioning himself with stories to recount as he journeyed across her flesh and through her presence. Coming to discover a richness of treasure: words endless from generations back with which to garland and festoon her sacral self: as he sets forth upon her, as he holds her feet and presses them against his forehead, so he invokes all the movement which has been hers to this moment, begs forth all the strength and tiredness of her walking feet, so as to touch her travelling soul: catching it on its journey, hustling up from behind and saying, "Wait! I'm here," clasping hands, smiling, he images the flow of her through her soles into his soul; it is his astral presence opening its arms; and he licks her, kisses her toes and licks at her ankles, becomes a slither of moist-warm adoration, a presence to her, a touch from within himself, letting her know that he is advancing, and it is up her thighs: tongue and fingers as tongues all about, flicking, and tasting, inhaling and massaging, working her like soft-ground after the rain, moving up on the clouds of his breath, misting, becoming her over-cast; blocking out any other suns, _Oh_ , he is jealous, he is secretive, he is paranoid! .... no one else, this is his land, "I claim this land in the name of Zav, God of the Goddess Lilith!" ... laughing inside, knowing that she knows, that her nipples hear him, that they rise and harden, knowing that as he lays his thigh astride hers, as their flesh forms boundary, as the muscles in his thighs tighten that she also tightens, that she is bounce to his thump, here a draw of water running up and she the bank hardening to restrain him, to hold him, and with every image ever known he flocks down upon her, himself a massive falling from the sky, a cloaking, a blanketing, simply, his lips kissing, and his tongue celebrating, and his fingers plunging into the pleasures of her soft belly, the roll and creamy flow of her belly down to her cunny, there with a thousand calls, a thousand invitations, a thousand conjurations: _Treasure of My Soul, Garden of My Delights, Sweet Honey-Hive!_ .... approaching her, imaging her, armed with images: for she is not taken by just one image, not one word, for she is multiple, she is many, this he knows, she is both a Goddess and all goddesses: this her trick, this her deliciousness ... _Hot Cunt!, Sweet Piece of Ass, Juicy Pussy!_ these to tease out her laughter, bawdy laughter, laughter of her Grandmothers, Shade Crones, she becoming as he knows she will, as he has been prepared to encounter, so many ages: soft as a nubile "Babe!"; yielding as a Fading Beauty; cagey as a Huntress: Baby Huntress that she is! ... oh, he unleashes himself: throws himself at her, at her feet, yields his soul through his hands as they fall in worship all over her; simpers into a fluid whine as he is beggar before her cave ... and it works! It is the magic: _he is the magic!_ For from within him explodes in quietness that blending of their bodies: entrance into her as she is Ocean for his rain: that blending which is that presence of this Other, this Thirdness, this What-we-are-not-but-must-become: _adoration which is birthing_.

"Just say _BIG_. Anyway you can." They're already tittering. "Enormous. Or, Gargantuan. They like that one! Or, Massive. Sometimes: _You're so big you're piercing my ass!_ " Even she had to pause to control the delightful giggle of one such memory! "Boys are like that. Call them. _C'mon, Big Boy!_ Believe me, you don't have to say much else!"

And it had worked with Zav. Why wouldn't it?

But, Lilith also knew that that wouldn't be all with Zav. Not, as she's been surmising, it is with Cilla.

Lilith had many memories of cocking during _Courting_. Had become as expert as any in stopping a boy dead in his tracks. Holding him and delightfully whirling his balls like a master thief twirling the lumen-bolts; she sighs, for it evokes one of her earliest memories of her goddess power, "Sheer magic!" Cilla herself recalled; so laboring from gentle stroke up to hard-stroking, mounting to a moment when all his flesh was rigid, knowing at that moment that his mind was totally zoned, that he was in another dimension, not one she could access but one she could conjure, and conjuration it was: his splattering not just high shots of sperm but evocations from so far down inside himself that it was like a voice from the beyond, normally dressed in simple gear, just a groan: an ethereal, almost ghastly, the nearest to a death-call she'd ever get: "O, God Almighty!" or there abouts.

But that wasn't Adoration. Not even if others said it was.

That's what was _Bad_ about Zav. He _expects_ more. Just as she did. _Why doesn't he ever tell me, though?_ A question not yet asked.

_Baby_. "Can I remember my own choosing?" Before bed-time, she has meditated on this. _The Embrace_ pauses.

But she never could. "Maybe I dream it? Who knows?"

Yet, she knows she knows about how to prepare.

As he comes: coming in the so many ways he has told me; coming with every sense, him as moisture, him as heat, him as pressure here and there, him as smell, smelling him, and in and through all these images allowing herself to be undone, to be unbounded from bone and flesh, untwined, to be spread out, spread across a piece of bread and eaten by him ... his so many comings: receiving his adoring gaze, laughing at the impishness in his grin, feinting and being playful with his kisses, lying to him as now he knows she lies, and now knows she wants him to lie, "You're the Biggest!" stated and restated in a thousand ways: but yet the one way, the only way yet to come, what she knows that he doesn't know yet -- _why_ is not on the table -- she lies there, and after the timelessness of his loving, the immeasureablness of his craving and his satisfaction, as she lies there and soaks in all the ardour of his many passions, so she turns: is turned inside-out as she turns: a turning of will but as if in concert with another, The Great Goddess, The Mother of All, The Thousand Breasted and Thousand Wombed: moves and so moves him: draws him inside her: deeply inside: where he becomes egg, and it is she who surrenders all that she is as she has known her presence to be: it is she who lifts up as Adorational Offering all that is her most individual and lonesome self: lifts up: is lifted up: and in the lifting is she penile, phallic, fully-Cock: and so plunging down, falling so as to die, to splatter, to pierce, to penetrate the egg: as such she becomes _Big_ : Full: Pregnant ... they fall away from each other: bodies now back at interstitial rest: bodies falling away as the petal loosed by beauty escapes, falls away upon the sun's kiss: fall away, fall apart, fall this way and that way: for the presence of the Third: the Child.

Mark and Cilla have many children, but never became fully pregnant: _Big._

# CHAPTER 22

Pregnancy. Birth. _Coupling_. Again, pregnancy, birth, _Coupling_. Family. Meaning the loop and the looping back. Seeing one's self in the flesh; experiencing one's presence in the hug, the nightly kiss goodnight; bedside; playing out the _Coupling_ Play as the young ones grow into _Courting_ and their own _Coupling_. Family as the greater family; extended. For these, the Four-Square: not their own naming, not even as taught as a Gathering Day notion, rather, what was being made of them; by the _Embrace_ ; by whatever having been In Africa had been.

Why not Mark and Cilla fully pregnant?

Mark and Zav opened a restaurant. Each had ventured into a job, then several others, till they decided, "Why not?" It was an undistinguished kitchen, but one which survived because of that key ingredient of success: location. Like the most ancient vendor of victuals who parks his or her vehicle of transport to dig a pit or pile some wood or install a technology: their oven was in the right location; the aromas did the rest.

"Not a killing, but a good year," said without exclamation; uttered as Zav had come to anticipate, actually come to relish, as Mark tidied up the last accounting tidbits for the year's end; _the tax commissioner cometh!_ ; knowing the phrase in its heartfelt message: "She'll be happy!" Indeed, the shes were: they never in fear of starvation nor destitution, such being inconceivable notions, never concepts, here in a society somewhat unaware of its peculiarity as materially suffuse, with no economic downs: just that, "Doing our share!" is what each and all had been raised to do, and as Mark's columns balanced, so was their life, "Good!" - yet knowing no one for whom it wasn't such.

For all this _The Embrace_ did not care. Did not pay an iota of attention. Watched the children come. Them grow. Drew them into the dreaming. But "they" weren't but distractions; fugues; other lives, important to the four, but then not, not in the grand scheme of things.

It came to Zav in as bewildering a way as that letter: "Greetings," and they were drafted.

"I followed _Prissy_ the other day."

What do you think of that, Xer?

Zav was at halt: total abrupt jerk and frozen in step. The air about him became thick; he saw himself like an insect in amber: forever in this moment of halt.

In this halt, the fury of the last days - no, as soon as he halted, it was a time-shot, a blast through days into weeks into months into years, right back to when they met: the parking lot: right back to where he is now: halt: the last months on re-wind now slowly, almost as if too cold to move: January cold: _Collegeville_ \- those years like fish under the ice .... _Blast!_ hearing Mark question the Elders, not like a question wanting an answer but a question like a challenge, as if "How can you say that!" meaning the Elders, they who have been absent for years, not gone, always around, but coming back as they did towards the end of _Courting_ , now the near end of _Coupling_ \- "Why are we together?" being the question initiating _Coupling_ , now its transition - "To what?" the logical question: men and women of their age: no longer zygotically pregnant, no longer parents as _Coupling_ novice parents are, slipping into "What?" - so does Mark's question express a questioning of why even the question has to be asked. Not like _Courting_. Not young students. Not young seekers. Now, Coupled lovers. Now, parents. Asking the other: "Why are we together?"

Zav hesitated to tell Lilith. What would he be telling her? That their whole life together was ... what?

" _Prissy_." He just said the word. She was lying in bed. Only the night-light warded off total blindness.

She said not a word. Her breathing never broke regularity. It was just time between them: both fell asleep.

Lilith had watched her parents. Kept up an openness with her mother. Not a nakedness of soul, just an openness. Certain things just were unsaid between those working on different aspects of their presence. Gathering Day teachings and practices kept them focused on what each had before them; the Day never called for too much curiosity as to what was not before them; ahead. There was a common acceptance of "What is _now_ before you, demands all of you!"

So, they talked, they shared what they could, they were happy to be part - whatever part that was! - of each other's world, but they were, simply, too deeply into their own to seek the depth of what lay ahead.

But as she had observed, so what she had seen did not disturb her.

"My folks are happy. They've really become friends." Such was not an uncommon statement of the times.

No one -- at least none focused on _Coupling_ \-- probed just what that word "friends" meant.

_Prissy._ There was something in the sound which was clear to all that it was not friendly. Mark spoke her name. Zav repeated the hiss. Of the two, Cilla heard its unfriendliness. She laughed. Lilith heard her laugh: knew what Cilla was about.

It is the time between us, now!

# CHAPTER I

"Prissy," he whispered. Tender. Exhaling the name: it pulling out as tail his most inner self; inhaling the sucking "s"es, being the spears she is thrusting into and through him: _it is as it should be_ , so she intones wordlessly to herself, _Exalt me!_

The room was there as if it had been there only for her since time immemorial. It was a sanctuary, deceiving in its appearance as a hotel room. Only a look and she could read the script, etched in suffering inside the walls. Molecules of wood and plaster, wallpaper and the ravaging battles of heat and dryness - each and all spoke to her; beseeched her; prostrated before her.

"You are magnificent," said with throat-clenching dryness. It was as if his whole life had stopped, stopped as in memory, as in accessing previous feelings - for he has bedded many a woman, a list of _Smithys,_ and he toted a satchel of ravenous feelings, but not now. _Now_ was all and only Prissy: he is drenched by her; is impossibly nothing but her: her every movement, the slightest - just a slight smile! - is his movement, his smile.

"Come." Sound. Word. But more, movement of face. Mouth forming itself to become seducing vortex. Just the letters, each alone, afloat, landing upon him and re-assembling themselves. Re-assembling and in doing so _C_ -tearing up, _O_ -ripping apart, _M_ -severing, _E_ -gouging, in every way dismantling him: his heart, his eyes, his soul - towards her he comes, absolutely thrilled, as hard as he's ever been hard: not aware of being not aware: she in a magical instant reclined upon the divan, in that magical instant she is Light, all manifesting Light: her flesh glowing cool white fire, her eyes sparkling, prismatic allure, her arms an embrace of suckling innocence .... by her, near her, falling down and in, falling into her, all consumed by the falling, allowing himself to fall, willing himself to fall, falling to fall: there is no halt, there is no end, there is no terminus, there is only ecstasy: into her: into her: into her ... " _Just one look!_ " his being sings, accepts, surrenders ... inside her never to return, as in _not-ever_ : to die, not symbolically, not metaphorically, not astrally, but really, truly: dead: obliteration, annihilation, consummation which is a savaging.

Void. Dark Vapors. Nihil: "Creatio ex nihilo!"

March Forbar was found dead, found by the maid as she came to make the bed, found dead, and "Dead," is all the coroner could articulate, for the young man was dead: not a heart attack, not a blow to the head, no sign of drugs, not suffocation, but, "Dead as I've never seen before. Totally relaxed. I think he was smiling!"

... _Fervent Exultation_.

# CHAPTER 23

_So?_ That's what the arched eyebrow, the slack in the jaw-line, _that turn_ just that sly dip of his head – but mostly the restrained wink: she knew he forced himself not to wink, this is what made her ... no, forced her, no twisted her: _Yeah, twisted!_ ... in her own mind: _THE END_ – once of _Courting_ , now of _Coupling_ ... _but this time_ ...

_March_ she calls him; not words, they didn't need words.

He had no words for her: "You're nothing!" is all echo in his flesh. And it is into this nothingness that he flings ... _but this time_ : "You're just a dick?" amused?

"Yeah," lasciviously; wickedly, as Badly as he could enflesh the feeling, the sound, the scream of his lungs.

So, she took his dick. Knowing why it was only a dick. "You've a bigger dick than Xer!" ... and it is all her Play. All her way.

March is screaming upon her: words and sounds and slaps and grunts and growls so fierce, so out of control, so abandoned that it is the effect of glossolalia: there is a break-through into the divine, the sacred, the Holy of Holies ... _"I parted the curtain and there was nothing."_

As Zav touches her, the code is ultimately broken: not that she had had any doubts, just that it was a confirmation: _finality_.

He has been kissing her for hours: as if all time is but one hour.

"I love you" was translated into more acts of adoration than she could number.

"I adore you," need not be spoken.

It was in such a moment that she heard her Sister call-forth, "Exult me!"

Knowing in that coded phrase their un-pregnant selves.

Deciphering what was in the Four-Square, but then not.

What would Zav had made of it? Any more than Xer would have?

There had never been a scintilla of breath where she had not been in both worlds: _In Africa_ and _Now_. She had no concern about the others: not a concern in terms of March's world – no need for balancing columns, for a zero-sum: no, she had become pregnant: which was her allowing herself to become unbalanced, chaotic, damaged, altered, abused, transformed, jilted ... Lilith laughs: Lan laughs: Cilla laughs: Priscilla laughs.

"You don't get it, do you?" With-holding "idiot, numb-skull," and other "Fool!" accolades.

"Put it away!" Almost wanting to laugh; it was all too silly.

"No, bud, I won't," as he wags it about as it hardens and he pushes it this way, that way, stroking it; always with eyes upon his Brother.

Zav wants to say, _We're too old for this!_ ... but there have been the dreams: _Where did it come from but the dreams?_ blurting out: "You're dead, fellow, March is dead!"

Mark ignites as the judgment is rendered.

_The Embrace_ gathers. "Why are we together?"

Had it been this simple question which _all_ had truly not faced?

"In truth, has the asking prevented us from doing?

Lilith had no need for words which she did not know nor would not have known if heard from an Ancient One: apostasy, heresy, blasphemy, damnation – certainly not Damnation!

"I don't want to be your friend."

Zav listened.

"I won't be." Stated forthrightly, not petulantly.

Xer hammered his right temple with the butt of his hand.

"I never have been."

Mark ignores her.

"Sister," to the one not-Big.

"Sister, why are _we_ together?"

_The Embrace_ ceased to be. Not that it disappeared. Oh, no, one of the First Truths of this now nominated "Ultimate Ascension" – being not Ultimate as they ultimately grasped! – is that nothing disappears: all is Present: what is termed Past and Future is what is simply forgotten or ignored or, more Truthfully, simply not robustly seen: _not peered into_.

"So?"

"Just one look?" issued on wings of hopefulness; of delightful expectation; of sacral awesomeness.

"Ha!" she laughs: a sonic boom, just one.

# PART 3: COMMUNING
# CHAPTER 24

_Blast!_ Just that. "BLAST!" All around her. More, she was _Blast!_ Chuckling. Finding a wicked glee in it. A huge sigh of relief. Catching herself observing herself wiping her brow, watching the flung sweat land in droplets like showering bombs: Blast! _Blast!_ "Blast!" ... All her thoughts. All her feelings. All her images, words – the grinding of the cogs in her brain: laughing: machining out _Blast!_ s ... Nothing in it about Moroni's Toot or anything Mormon or for that matter anything which she realizes she remembers as "anything" ... for it is all original time and space: indeed, _indeed_ , inside her mind, her hands tapping each other, almost slapping, her feet ready to move, not knowing where, not slipping into any known vector, just all this as _Blast!_ ... the dream: _March is dead!_ or was it a dream? _Is Zav dead?_ ... _Blast!_ and where are these Ancient Ones but blasted into oblivion! She comically draws her head and it is a block of granite in one frame, a thousand shards in smithereens in the next ... all this, _What do I feel?_ Not even an answer, just her step, said with her whole being, _I feel great!_

_Great: Greatness_. These were words she could use; did; not to others, just to herself. What was it all but Great? "Great-Mom," that's how the grandkids called her, just from the start: was it their perception of size? _Or ...?_

Lil knew that, like her grandchildren, many more had begun to see, see the details _: the peering_ – not just psychic, not just spiritual, more: in the actual fact of somatic details, as if in _that dream_ : that all were not Mel, all not alike, but as with Prissy and Lillian, March and Xer: the somatic differences, yet this all slipping into the every-day on _slow-leak_ , just statements here and there; and so her kids: prophetic? – "out of the mouth of babes" – what parent hasn't said that even if not knowing its lineage?

For the four had become _Golden_. As at Twenty so back at Fifty, it had just happened. Hair from brown to golden, nothing else changing. _But now_? ... It had been her first grandchild, babe in the crib, reaching up and touching what no one said but Lil knew, glancing at Zav: it was Xer's smile, her touching the _silver streak_ ... GREAT! All about has become greater, not just fuller, but denser, thicker, yet ever more transparent, translucent: _personal_ \- she knows that it is from their Communing: but yet even another step beyond: beyond Coupling, beyond Embrace, into ....? _yet_ , still: with Zav or Xer ... _March?_

("Cilla!," waving her over.)

_Great_. How many years _beyond_? Communing: ten. Fifteen? Five giving her grandkids: a passel. But that was just on the surface. Them blasting out from those who had blasted out from inside her! That was just like her parents. The imagery tickles.

_Great._ Yet, _not_ friends like her folks. _Not_ friends like Mark and Priscilla. Not like that. Not friends at all, is how she speaks with her eyes as Zav enters the room: any room. _What?_

"Great!" – it defines them: true ... _but_.

But it isn't him _. Curious_. Not at this Moment. This is what the Blasting has uncovered. That " _GREAT!_ " with all capitals and high enthusiasm is her flesh torching into a solitary blaze, rendered: "Cilla!"

Lilith knows Cilla as blasting cap – "Enough with this blasting stuff!" chiding herself. _But it is so incredible!_ "No, you are incredible!" out loud, to herself, but willing to say it, state it, fling it out onto wings in front of anyone. _Where is Cilla?_

"I never got Big." Cilla knew that Lil would have said it; she just wanted to beat Lan to the punch.

Lilith doesn't turn towards her, but her back says it; that's all Prissy needed to read: Lan's back towards her! – ("Fucking dream!")

Sisters talk: "That's the rub. I'm not your Sister." No big huffy-puffy deal made about it. No response whimpering: "Oh, yes you are!" and, not a teary embrace; none of that crap.

"Did you ever really want to be my Sister?"

Now, the pregnant moment: _Do you?_

("That's the rub!")

Whatever _The Embrace/The Communiol Council of Twelve_ had been – "Is?" – Lilith knows that it was no more. Not for her. And that's it: _the rub_ as she's become overly fond of saying.

"You know what I mean, don't you?" to Cilla.

"Do I?"

"Ah, ever the cutesy Lacy Lily, aren't you?"

Cilla hated that; hates that she hadn't been Prissy.

("Lilith is Prissy." March hated the tottering metaphysics of it; countered,. "Xer, that blossom's got to you." Very, very upset and off his point.)

"Look, they were _always_ right about only _one_ thing," and her finger pops up, not the Screw-You finger, but her slightly wobbling pinky, "one thing – all space and time _does_ change."

An eyebrow lifted in a motion Cilla was not used to, found uncomforting; it betrayed: _Clear as mud!_ ... Cilla sighs: too many sighs this mother-of-sighs sighs within: "I'm glad March got it the way he did. _Good girl_!"

Was Cilla really going to be ready for this? This _Blast_!?

"Babe, I'm the only hot cock you'll ever need!"

Said that: fire dripping over her lips, strings of streamy, sizzling fire: lava mouth, but of hollowing desire, a volcano of desire: yes, Lilith flushes with that image, as it comes, as it slowly boils and then _Blast_! into eruption: _I'm a volcano!_

("Switcheroo!")

_I was never fully pregnant_. Coming to her lips, not unwelcomed, just rudely unannounced: combing her hair, a hundred strokes or more on the days she remembers to do so ... long mirror, half-naked, liking to look at herself, not so much in self-infatuation as with a basic comfortableness with her unclothed self: so the sentence was heard, heard first before spoken, realizing that it was herself speaking: like a road-sign all of a suddenly popping up and causing you to question – _What?_ and then questioning with other questions: _Where? Why? When?_

Cilla knew that Lil had been Big, even when not carrying. She just knew that. You could see it in the kids: almost brothers and sisters, so close; yet, she had no doubt that they were all Ascends and hers but first or nears. But they never talked about it, back then. Not really a space or a thing between them. But now it is all clear.

("Whenever we get near that, you start drinking." Cilla stood up and walked over to the wet bar.)

"Zav's a real pip when pregnant."

Just like that – including him. Applying the word as if a verb. One which _they_ acted, or acted upon them. Cilla knew from that first time, in the kitchen when she had been into her violet period: limes and vines and things violet which were not supposed to be violet: Lil's "Violet Period" – it was a joke among the four.

("Camouflage?" an Ancient One queried.)

The first moment of _Blast!_ – back when she had not the word, hardly the image: Lil welcoming him home, handing Zav a violet: verbal monologue, "Us!" ... he accepted it as a fundamental fact, truth of the Universe.

"You get the gist of this Embrace, no?"

"It didn't exist?" A fear-edged question; not an affirmation; certainly, hoping not for a confirmation.

Lil sniffs; jerks her head back a notch and sniffs, once, again: not snorts, just as if testing the wind for scent: not intentional, but telling.

"It exists. No doubt." _Council, Communio, Embrace_ : there was a pain to the confirmation that she could not express; didn't want to.

"Our lives," pause, a true hesitation, the stepping back from the precipice, but a stepping back with surprise, not having seen, not having anticipated a precipice, yet, once there, realizing that that was all that there was: only the precipice.

"Our lives are as full, as Great, as Big... it's our world. It's our faith. It's _all_ we have. It's all we can dream about."

If _she_ had not been there – _is here!_ \-- no, the Sisters would not have done so at the moment; they would have scurried back, heads bent, pressing their hands over their ears, calling down for a blindness of eye!

: _she_ \- it could come no way but this way. How to say that it had come her way because of Zav? But, that's not for now. _Big_ Zav is not for now. ("Bullshit!") Cilla is for now. Prissy and Lan and Luscious Lil and Lacy Lily .... It is with such a bedazzling array: an adornment of her body which unfailing seduces her Sister - would any Sister! – and unbounds envy and admiration and the heated press of one female to another: so unshy about being the other -- "Oh!" true emotion, solid, "Oh! Let me try _that_ on!"

Lil knows what she's doing. _Try Zav on!_ she wants to say; did utter silently to herself: but knowing how readily – _how stupidly!_ ("Patience!" the Deacon so trained.) – Cilla would catch the words and turn them back to Courting words, to Tag words: so she doesn't ... preparing by remembering their Tag: one and only: as it was to her, linked to both, kissing both, her twin mouths kissing: Mark she raising to his screaming delights, deep groans, working his cock with expert fingertips and liquid lips, all up and down transforming him into liquid fire, becoming his pulse, her eyes squeezing his balls, gobbling the sight of himself which he has ever refused to see, so is she opening him as Zav is delighting in the kiss of her southern mouth, plunging and plundering and playing her about, heaving her sweet buttocks up and over his heart, a heart beating its pulse through his cock, beating into her and it is she who becomes their communing, her presence of flesh and desire which is their touch each of the other, Zav coming with all his essence into her and so entering Mark, Mark jolting and bolting, shooting himself electric through her mouth, into her belly, riding astral waves of shock into Zav, streaming up his cock, cocking his eyes with pleasures: images, imaginings, wakeful dreams of union and communion; so it is she, the forever She, who is now the water they play in together, splash about; it is Her who becomes them, the commonness of their shared desire for eternal potency; she not reservoir as she is Deep Well ... she laid down that time with them each at her breasts, knowing Cilla's patient desire: reading her patience as they had been taught, trained, observing her observing them, not deviating from protocol ... what was she imagining?

:imagining – Lilith imagines Cilla: her as kissing their men: coupled with all maleness ... she hadn't talked, Lil knew it hadn't been the same: "But so shall it be!" ... all pearlescent sheen: a body which shimmies: flows liquid with the beauty of lines evoked by pearls and other precious stones: ringed fingers, languishing earrings, slithering necklaces and wristlets ... _Water!_ is how Lilith is imaging herself: as water athirst with the mystery within: beckoning the fisherwoman with the beauty of necklaced trees, the ruffling playfulness of the ebbing waves, the teasing glints of sunlight and the dervish frolic of birds and bugs: sounds and hums and the dreaminess of simple, robustly naive beauty ... and Cilla does come; does set down by the lake's edge; does unfold herself to become part of the landscape, of this cameo of Nature ... is just there and in the there of a moment of unknowing, so is _she_ there: the Lady of the Lake ... Priscilla lays back, opens her arms, lets fall away her thighs, yields her tongue to bird flight, her eyes free into darkness, her mind, her soul, her every self: the thirst flows around her, laces over her, beside her, wets her, soaks, drenches, submerges ... drowns: "Prissy drowned in the lake!"

# CHAPTER J

Priscilla Young sat at the bed's edge drinking straight from the wine bottle; not having ever drunk alcohol or caffeine or gom or razz-tazz; not a smoker, not a blossom huntress; nothing but _Purity_ : "It's your heritage," as if it had to be said! ... she is sarcastic with herself: _Me?!_ – she knows he's dead, not having seen dead before, but he is, she's sure: _swigs_ : someone inside her guzzles an unfathomable swig: that someone who has _always_ been there ... "Heritage?" comes mocking, but not a voice sound, just looking at him, corpse there, on the floor, wanting to laugh – "Ha!" a curt snarl escaping: this she knows is her Heritage ... he being so much the Marcher, so much the Rider: all over her and in her and through her; he had even knelt before her, she in naked splendor, knowing that her aura suffused him, bathed him, he uttering words without sounds, sounds without motion, motions without thoughts – "I adore you!" but she said, Not enough!; "I worship you!" but she said, Not enough!; "I exult you!" and so she let him die: _I am the Lord thy ..._

She imbibed only half the bottle.

Then she left.

"Cilla!" It was the buoyant voice of her Sister, Lilith.

Followed quickly with a warm press on her hand, "It's a boy!"

When they left – Lil and Zav – Cilla pressed her belly ever so lightly: "Living tomb!" she whisper: _Ancient Ones!_ : knowing the whisper will reach Mark; feeling March stir within her.

"Lazarus," so his son she named.

# CHAPTER 25

_Cilla_. Coming now to call her only and ever, "Priscilla." Not granting _any_ space and time its divide, or, at least, not the astral divide which was blasted away that moment she became Ancient – became _Embrace_.

_Why isn't Priscilla fully pregnant?_ They were four-square enough such that this became her own singular question: had its life in her dreaming. Point: it never left, might never leave her dreaming: for when she is Communing with Zav she opens to a different quality, possibly kind, of _Big_ : a full erotic presence: a dreaming which is memory, imagination, magic!

("Maybe this is who I am in four-square? _This questioning!)_

Did she ever question that any had stopped dreaming? That Africa had simply been left behind in that room? That _The Embrace_ had "let us be" – just "return home," become some kind of normal? "No."

Lilith first knew this pregnancy the moment she was "in Africa" – knew all that Prissy and Lan, even Lacy Lil: Mormon Women, daughters of previous Ascends, more: of those in _The Embrace_ , itself – knowing that it was them as Four-Square which was _The Embrace_ 's own pregnancy, not in mere body, but as to fuller body, fuller soul – collective, communal, cosmic: Ascended presence: on every dimension ... knew as she looked at Priscilla, at her varied Sisterly manifestations that there was a difference: knowing from Mark's fierce Nothingness that near-Ascends were reborn towards their Final Ascension: so, too, this both the mystery and the obviousness of _The Embrace_ ... now, all her children born: all souls Ascending: and Priscilla with Mark, just the first-times, souls barely formed, some yet dead: soulless ... how to convey this? Wasn't Priscilla a near-Ascend? Even Mark? ... the four-square knot tightens: _Blast!_

_Blast_. Now a quiet word. A calm word. A word which was smooth. _Just that it is happening._

"I've lost all those words. See, I took _just one look!_ and..."

Why is she holding her ears? "Priscilla. Damn it woman, we've gotta get beyond this!"

Cilla just didn't want to look; certainly not hear.

( _I need a drink!_ )

If it had been the other way, Lilith mulls, if Zav hadn't somehow – _How? ... Yeah, that's how ..._ Lilith grasps the how: but in Mark's curious way. The columnar balance. The two of them, so fated to be together, but each not knowing fully the why. Mark coming to his howl and hollowing of emptiness upon her body: hollowing flesh, not hallowing soul! (" _Bullshit!_ ")

She – was it by the third or the fourth pregnancy? – taking him to "Big" seed within her: the seed of his emptiness. This is why she so heartfeltly knows her Sister's plight."But Zav?" This the forever Lover's question; a query which has no answer, only the throb of yearning given it by the Lover's lips ... Zav: she doubted not that he knew. "But how couldn't he?" _Why didn't I ever ask?_ Carrying all those year's Mark's sterile seed. But a sterility which is now deadly potent, so Lil peers: those dead seeds drilling their numbing into her skin: Priscilla's skin: into _their_ dead eggs, generating dead souls!

Didn't The Embrace throb violet as I so peered?

"This is Bad. Truly Bad!" Cilla gasps for air: fears drowning.

("Look, it's simple, _The Sins of The Fathers_ _are_ ...")

(" _The Sins of The Mothers ...?_ ")

_Bigness:Pregnancy._ All had been about this. The Courting. The Coupling. "Obvious." ( _Okay, I admit. Only obvious now flowing beyond Communing!_ )But that's not it. Lil runs her finger down her breasts onto her belly: _space and time_ she plays, taps, surfaces the humor: What has Priscilla said? Even if drunk - _empty_ womb ... "I'm a tomb!" sobbing.

_Tomb._ That's the rub. When Coupling ends: not just a woman's question: "living tomb" – just waiting to die: but a male's: "What good is my seed now?"

"Mark, as translated," Lilith muses, happy to inter his own confession: _You are nothing!_

For March it had always all been solely about seed. This what the males shared: less calling themselves Brothers as the women did Sisters, but this, an unrecognized message in itself.

"What good is my seed?" had threaded many a drunk conversation. Right from the beginning: burned, burrowed, stamped into, onto his brain, memory, vision: from that moment in pre-Courting class when the simple biology of "doing it" had been illustrated.

This what Zav knew drove Mark. The endlessly seething craziness about, "Trying to figure it all out. Make it balance!"

"Do you realize _how much_ seed we scatter ... how much just perishes!"

Astonishment. Bafflement. Awed.

( _Ha! Ontic Dread!_ )

Zav chortles inside: seeing Mark as Archer, lifting up every sperm, arrow to his bow, not shooting but guiding, directing, flying with each sperm ensuring that it hits the bull's-eye: each wiggling, squiggling ("Squealing?") sperm stabs an egg – _Not one got away!_

Lilith felt that she had actually heard Mark's words: as the underside to his "You are nothing!" is this balancing "Just one?" meaning just one pregnancy – having received millions of seed: Pricilla could never "balance out" – for she was just one out of millions. Mark's sense of loss was, indeed, dreadful: _purely_ ("With no deviation from the norm!")

Lilith had imagined, but "Prissy drowned in the lake."

Zav had imagined, but "The coroner scribbled: _Forbar, March – suicide_."

"Why isn't Priscilla pregnant?" means "Why is Mark nothing?" which means _What?_ ... She refuses not to blast and blast and _BLAST!_

Zav had offered without being asked: "Mark. Sometimes he gets to me. Hmmph. Many times. Annoying. He's chasing some Greenies. I know _. I know this_. Don't ask me how. I just know."

Mark his Greenies; Cilla her bottle.

"But we don't believe in Original Sin ... _do we?_ "

It was plaintive; anguished; dreaming the loss of their friends, more, their souls: dreaming inside their dreaming ....

# CHAPTER 26

"I just don't feel great ... certainly not _Great!_ "

"Can you see the wisps of grey in my hair?"

Cilla cowers – at least how she conveys her response to Lilith, not looking away, but not being there.

"Okay," with all the controlled frustration possible. "Priscilla. It's just that you've never been exalted by cock." Not stopping; knowing that Priscilla doesn't want her to stop if stopping means a response, "All the Courting. The Coupling. The Tags. You have to understand," pause; finger twirling a grey strand, left-side, "come to understand that we've had sex without having sex." Stop.

"Isn't that what you once said was Zav's poetic crap?"

"True. _Guilty!_ but on Mark's terms!" coming to sit down next to, "So, I have to tell you this story. I call it, "Slipping inside." Just let me make it simple. Then, it can get complex." Calm voice, yet one punctuated by the stealth of a trembling secret: "It's when I got exalted." An instant recoil; but smiling, amused, "Yeah, when Xer got what he always wanted!"

Cilla was conflicted; the doors had no knobs; Lilith had swallowed all the keys! ... _Oh!_ she wants to be Prissy at this Moment.

"Pay attention. Zounds, this is a Bad Story!" gleefully.

"Think back when we all left the Education Zone. Remember that? You gotta remember that! ... _The South!_ ... No matter." She looks her Sister straight in the eyes as she begins:

_Long, long ago_ , in a far away Zone, a woman woke from her afternoon nap .... woke and felt like making love, but not just making love, no, she had this itch, a chilly feverish flush and she knew it was _that_ time. See, there were these times, Great Moments, so to speak, and this woman, she knew one was here: the sixth decade. _Sexta_ \- the root imagery delighted her!

So ... she pulls the black-out drapes on the torrid high-desert sun. She pumps up the breather to lure a chill into the room. She puts on her flannel nighties, furry booties, and lets down her hair, flocking it to spread fully across her shoulders: _fallen snow_.

As pitch-dark as she could make it: stuffing towels into sun-peek crevices, layering, hanging, draping others like eye-patches blinding the room, then she lit candles all around.

Squat reds with thick flapping tongues

Tall, elegant virgins on hand-carved pedestals - four of these, the Four Directions - dove-tongues.

One candelabra at the highest point upon a faux-highboy.

A nest of votives - humorously black: offerings from a sacred campfire.

She creates her own shadowy heaven set with flickering stars and virgin moons and fleeing stellar phantasms.

A fist of sandalwood incense sticks: artfully air-painting streams of bewitching smell.

An anointing dab of almond oil upon her breasts.

Quiet jazz-razz in the background; mostly pre-Ascendancy piano. Some strings. No horns.

She stands in bedroom center and twirls herself slowly around, once to the left, once to the right, all the time imagining the world outside: outer space: so creating it - gloomy, snow-thick gusts, ice fangs attacking the neighbors' roofs - an alien, hostile, fearsome world: below-zero heart-beat threatening.

Imagining inside: all becomes warmth: hot breath warm; snuggling, nesting, caving. Body-heat warmth.

"Now, where's _he_?" She means her husband; she knows he's at work, but that's not it: the question is more than that. Let's call him Xer! ( _Hey, their name is all the same!_ )

She wanted to do it _The Northern Way_. It was a game they played - at least had played often back then, up there, across the map, "x"ed somewhere near a cliff atop a Mighty River - not playing it here in the South – but, see, yes, they're south and by salty water, an ocean, call their spot "O" – and since they had arrived, _now, how many years? almost ten - cripes!_ they had never done it "up North," as it also was called.

_The Northern Way_ was a game for the deep winter. Especially the overcast days. When the sky, itself, was worn like a heavy, thundering buffalo blanket, one draped across her back, feeling it, fingering it, settling it here and patting it there upon her shoulders: those mornings she rose and realized that the earth was still asleep, more: deeply dreaming, yet more: sedated under the thick woolly gloom of sunless sky ... but it wasn't for her - _for us!_ \- to be sunless - in fact that was why she played the game: "Grope! Grope!" she'd croak as she threw the bed's blanket over Xer's head - he wakes knowing the game - responds in gravelly morning voice, "Grope. Grope.": instantly amused – she laughing, giggling, squiggling towards - _Goddam!_ Xer always swore to himself when first aroused: cursed mutedly and then let her have her way, no matter what, no matter which day, what time of the month, _whenever_ , when she came with _Grope! Grope!_ Xer knew that they were about to "slip inward" - _Not just great sex_ , he had shared with ... ( _You know it has to be March!)..._ with March: on the beach, an ocean beach, somewhere, once a month, drinking and doping, "Guys night out!" - it had opened a serious conversation neither had intended but which still raged on, argumentatively, adversarially ... " _Inward_. It's like being peeled. She does it all blind-eyed. Like a mole, she says, doesn't want to see me. Just licks and sniffs and rubs and ..." he plopped off into dumbness, his mind talked but his mouth didn't move; two minutes and March was agitated, "Go on! What happens?"

Xer grimaces, grins, exhales, shakes his head so shaking off his buddy: _How to simply say,"The Northern Way?"_

" _Lily!_ " It was Xer's high-pitched, cracking falsetto, mocking _Life with Father_ 's "Vinnie, I'm home" home-from-work greeting. From the first day of their marriage he had so cracked himself up as he entered the house: _just love this little silliness!_

But as he halted to adjust to the coolness - "What was it? 105 today?" said, as he left his work-out, to the receptionist. She playfully dabbing her cheeks. Even though it was by the ocean, and even though it was a dry climate, they lived just too far inland-east and a spiral hike uphill-north to not make one-hundred and five a walking sweat. Small beads had popped open on his brow, just minutes ago, as he stooped to pull an odd weed or two, then three, four – a dozen! - from the flower-beds they had planted this Spring. So, he had expected the coolness. Looked forward to it as his thirst did to a frosty brew. Over the years, had adjusted to his body's reaction: sucking in the breather's coolness just like his frozen carcass sucked in the North Country's furnace solar heat - but he had not expected it to be, "Cold?!" A shiver: _Gods and Goddesses, what's she up to?_

"The O Way" – ("Called it that instead of Southern. Don't know. Like Northern seemed wet, but South dry, so she wanted the water. Anyways, it's _her_ story.")

"O's live on the beach. It's that simple." March uttering one of his many profound insights, this time sociological.

"Houses are irrelevant. Like lizards under the greasewoods - just a temporary shelter. Out of the mid-day sun. That's all."

Maybe.

But Lily and Xer had adjusted. It took a couple of years. But they did make it to the beach. _The O Way_ being so much more than "literal March" could have conjured - and which Xer had not shared with him, back then.

_Nakedness._ But not just as to clothes; not just disrobing. But a nakedness like at birth: _umbilical_. "The O breaks - _my water_ \- and we're born anew." Lily had said that with such calmness, such quiet discovery in her voice that it made Xer chuckle - "Why are you laughing?" a stab of pain - "No. _No_ ," he was ever sensitive to her over-sensitivity to his - _to her_ \- queer fits and snorts of laughter.

"No. Not you. _Me_. ... How could I've been so stupid?"

_That_ night. At _its_ moment of their mis-fitting each other, so did the newness which "The O" was open to them.

The truth of the beach.

March's unplumbed profundity: _Houses are irrelevant._

As the water dribbled, first, at their toes. As it licked, in time, their calves. As it slurped their full torsos as they ignored the rhythm of the sea: each rising and falling in its distinct tempo ... the water they allowed to encroach, to come as the alien breath it is, to breathe them in, take them upon its lips, sip and slip them in upon its tongue, wash them around in its mouth - temptation so magical that they could not resist: _Swallowed!_

"Drowning in each other." _Did they both speak this at once. Or was it the O?_

"When you wear the O, you need not nakedness."

This insight came months later. And when it did, so did they fully grasp how profoundly they had mis-understood _The Northern Way._

Xer hesitates before turning the master bedroom handle. Not a hesitation as in fear, but one as in preparation. His mind reaches out with astral senses to contact her, she behind this door, she tapping her arcane, esoteric Morse Code upon the cooling degrees. _Can I ever be ready?_

Gropegropegropegropegrope ....

....................................

"Are you listening?" irritated; hopeless.

" _Grope_ ," croaks tinnily; smallness; mustard seed; dry tear springing.

......................................

_Slipping inward._ The singular motion of deep winter. Ever inward. Into the tinniest of spaces. Seeking refuge from the greater world. _Reducing_ one's space. Reducing through clothing; furring one's self; layering; with only eyes visible: ski mask, gloves, boots, ear-muffs, bear-skin hats - only lips forsaken, even eyes can be goggled ... inside, there is no thought to the house as tomb or womb or cave or coffin: _no thought_ , just survival, and those who survive are - "Slip inward, Xer. Let me slip inside _you_."

No eyes. No quick hands. No buck and fuck. No watching the clock. No ears to hear but what is muffled.

_All is breathing_. Waiting for her breath. Receiving his as the tempo to her melody. Hearing with the cheek. Drifting upon the heart's pacing desire. Heat seeking. Inching closer; microscopic. Ever cautious. Cautious not to miss her or him. Not to miss a molecule, an atom of desire. Breathing so that theirs is a common breath. Upon her cheeks. Upon his lidded eyes. He breathes a longer exhale. She is eager to be drawn in upon his inhale.

_Skin_. What they know, what they have practiced: not as boundary but as boundless. They kiss. Lips gently pressed. Docking. With precision. Fully touching lips. Slight breathing. _He is ecstatic that she has found him! She is pleased that he has come!_

Their lips key the moment. Lips which have kissed a thousand times, yet not once! Not this momentous once.

For it is their lips which are magical. Ever so deftly touching, ever so humbly pressing: their hearts open. Their hearts call each to the other. Their hearts break like waves worshipping the embracing sand.

_Water._ What else? The crudity of the physical: "bags of carbon based water" – _Star Trek_ 's legendary amusement. They need not the humor. For as the water in the font blesses the infant with sacral thirst, so does their skin so liquefy.

She rose to this day seeking to drink him. To slake her soulful thirst with his presence. She had imagined him all day in this worshipful way. She did not need to pause to question whether he also so rose. She knew her magic. She had come to trust his responsiveness. His thirstiness.

_105 outside!_ So, there was but a tie-less shirt to discard, sandals to kick off, pants flung aside, and before he could, so did she, vaporize his briefs!

With March he had kidded himself about "like a lever" – he'd see her breasts and he'd become steel – "Never fails. What? A thousand screws and I'm still "automatic" ... _Christ Almighty!_ " But especially her touch: "Not just hands," and here is where he loses March – "Stay literal. This metaphoric stuff is just crap. You can't measure sentiment!" _Oh, well._ – "Her touch" meant more than the words, was indeed even beyond metaphorical, was magical – _How?!_ – _Gropegropegrope_ ... no thoughts as she kneels before him, bewitching him with her blinded eyes: hands, lips, body, soul reaching out to him, stroking him, slipping herself over him, swallowing him, raising him so that he rises from her mouth as totem, extending from the bottom to the top of their inward world: staking the cosmos, staking himself deep down within her, she, as he is staked, letting loose of all her skin so that she unfurls, flutters out into cosmic breeze, and as she flaps and whips in this inward space so it is their spirits which unveil themselves, this the deep, the Great Nakedness they seek: that of the ocean which is in clapping harmony with deep winter.

Groped; groping: blind-eyed, two moles snuggly in their keep: body-warming.

: _inwardness_ – her toes he kisses, prostrates: presses against his forehead, calls her to walk upon his intellect, to explore the pathways of his imagination, all he need whisper is "Walk!" with quiet enthusiasm, in prayerful worship – she hears and so expires, dies to the flesh of even this room, of the scent and non-sense and senselessness of it all: she walks exploring, she ambles in this their day-dreaming, she flows with him – "You are so powerful!" she wants to say, but doesn't – for she is also fearful: dread of innocence, awe-struck, he humbles himself imagining so that as she meanders and inquires she comes to the waterfall of his heart, admires it, stands beyond it, wants to lift her flasher and take a snapshot ... but she cannot stand apart, _No!_ – as she gazes so does she float through the air, and it is his tongue upon her thighs which is his desire drawing her, magnetizing; it is his quiet kisses upon her cunny which is sweetly sucking away her impassioned breath – she is drifting inward: his hands cup her breasts, his fingertips wildly cheer and madly abandon themselves to the pleasure of her beauty, her guileless, lustful pleasuring, for it is hers as it is his pleasuring, his fondling of her hidden self – for she has always hid from him, so she knows, now so she knows he knows! – he is skinless, he is tongueless, he is handless, he is cockless!

: _inwardness_ – she cannot but worship him! For it is this for which she has come to be so that _they_ may be. Worship him and unearth that of herself which is sacral flame: vent, discharge, erupt! So did she know the first time she stroked him, aroused him, took him groping into deep winter. For it was she who is stealing him. As the thief rustles through the everyday to find the hidden spot, so had she stolen his treasure. Sniffed; licked; rubbed – erased the line of his flesh: no longer outer, only inward.

He who she knew – this an amusement to her, her own unabashed titter of mirth – knew that he didn't even know what his treasure was! _The goldenness of inwardness_. ... Simply satisfied to share with her his orgasmic treasure – so was he quick to disrobe – _Ha!_ – so was he quick to become bare and to bare all of himself, to share with her what he, back then, thought was his inwardness: his intimate self as homunculus; seedy ... but she couldn't settle for cock, she couldn't settle for his settling just for cunny. No! Greater Nakedness. Fuller. Robuster. _Is he not conscious? Or not unconscious?_ Questions which she quickly dismissed, for it was as natural to him as to her, so she realized the first time he had slipped inward to her that dismal February day ... "He just has more clothes," said to herself upon watching him after this first magical day: "Males have more clothes." And she laughs as she pictures the Proto-Classical Sculptures with the fig-leafs. "So many fig-leafs," cast out to him as they left the _Walker Art Center_ later that same day.

"Yeah."

Did he have to say – to confess! To proclaim! To bare! – anything else?

.............................................

Cilla listened to the end. _Beyond The End_. Which she knew, knew by the breath within her, this new life: more than seed, more than egg: a flower – rose, stood up and felt the uprush of rising as if impelled by groundly exhale, this her plant self, with long roots – _Oh!_ she could see now, see back and then, see into every movement of every motion of Mark who truly was March-dead: as dead as all her children have been ... _Oh!_ she aches ... just there, without movement: aching being her being, but a good ache, the parturitional ache, but this time inward, not outward, implosion, _not_ ... "My cock!" she delights: _Cilla is intimate with Lilith: Cilla has Zav Big, slipping inward_ ... "Now, to hit my Mark!"

# CHAPTER 27

Isn't Jesus, also Christ, enough?

Suppose he isn't?

But if you believe in Christ ... in the Ascension?

I believe. But maybe not how you do.

Even these _Smithys_ praise Him!

Didn't she tell you? They say you _are_ Him!

Risen?

Yeah: smirk: _Risen!_

So, your point, my great Doubter!

There's a point: _points southward_. Risen, not just to Rule in Heaven but Fuck throughout the Cosmos!

Those girls? _Blushed shock_.

Did you ever hear a sermon about ... about _that_ at Mass?!

_Muttering_ : They go to a Temple.

Ha! C'mon, say it.

(Muted bewilderment.)

Maybe _that's_ the problem.

I can say it ... but not about _Him_.

Who doesn't believe, now?

(Frown.)

Isn't he a man?

(Slow "Yes.)

Fully?

There's a difference ...

Between ...?

_XER_ : Being a man, and, and - _male_. He wasn't _that_ way.

What way?

(Uncomfortable thoughts: breath momentarily held; cheeks, lips, eyebrows a frozen pastiche of consternation.)

Not upright? _Ha._

Don't!

Why do you want more than that?

Thought I didn't, till I did.

Aw, it's all in your imagination.

Yeah?

You doubt prophecy? The Urim and Thummin!

Like just adolescent thoughts. All jumbled. Crazy. Weird.

So?

_So_ \- so, maturity is figuring it out.

It?

_MARK_ : The _simplicity_ of it. Men and women. Males and females. One goes in. One comes out. It's like "fire in the hole," but hell, it ain't god ... or anything like that!

Sure?

Sure.

("I Coupled with her. Why wasn't it any different than when Courting?" The Ancient Ones, all the Deacons, were mute, not just silent. He knew he was right. Had always tallied correctly! "I'm just fucking bored out of my mind!" ... He awoke.)

God was intimate with Mary, so why not with us?

Lan, don't say that!

Don't say you never thought?! _Mother God._

If I did - and I'm not saying - only Father would know.

If you did confess it, what did He say?! _Come here, girl_ : seductively; lewd.

You're terrible, girl!

No. It's terrible not to think it - not to _know_ it. My vagina is the Gateway to Eternal Bliss. It's Holy. Sacred. A Grove. Not just a baby chute! Even here on Earth, this Planet Eternally _Young_! _Giggles_ , a self-confident giggle.

You're shameless!

So?

_Pondering; wondering_ : The Pre-Ascendancy gods did it with geese or something, right? All life?

You're missing the point. No one should be "doing it" to another! It's _not_ sex. It's sex without having sex. Presence, relationship, get it?

Oh, sure, me and Mark, too literal - you two on that again?

_Empathetic_ : Can you really feel it only as an invasion?

How can you not?

("War of the Sexes, baby!" _en garde_.)

Know, you should keystroke that for _CourtingWeb_.

_ZAV:_ _Holy J-S_! you're missing the point.

Oooo, ole Four-Bears, hit something there, didn't I?

No, _you_ missed something there, asshole.

Tsk. Tsk. You're the one turning us into Holy Cocks! _Smithy's gotcha!_

Can't you get past that?

Where's past that?

I like the candles and stuff. You're very imaginative. Even if a bit daffy!

Like the frosting on the cake, but not the cake?

Why put it that way?

Just an image.

_CILLA_ : That's insulting. As if the only one who really knows what sex is!

I didn't mean that.

But you do it every time. _Every time_.

You're angry.

Genius!

What?

Not this time! No, listen, the body's the body. The soul's the soul. Mark and I _have_ talked about this. You and Zav aren't the only ones who share intimacy, ya know.

Sorry.

(Fury.)

More coffee?

We pray.

Before. After. During.

During?

Yeah; okay ... but _what_?

That we'll be receptive, open, thoughtful of the other person - not just self-centered. We want, what's, how to put it? Sounds wrong, but _purity_. We want our love to be pure.

How can it be impure?

(On tower watch, sentinel for the flanking action.)

_Again_ : Can it be impure?

You jest?

I do?

C'mon, you know what's impure!

(Raised eyebrows, "Oh really?" lip smirk.)

Why can't you be literal on this one?

This is the _only one_ which isn't literal.

Oh, right!

That's why it's the Virgin Birth. You know that, _poet_.

So, it's not the woman who's Virgin, but the child?

A Truth from the Ages: an ageless balance – from out of nothing is something created. From the filth of her flesh, the purity of our souls!

"I and the Father are One"? Literal? Naturally, I see - because males really don't need women, not for spiritual birth?

Don't need to twist that!

You mean it's not just Jesus; it's all men? Prissy's got to you! You're losing your Catty edge.

Not really. The Mystical Body. That's why it's Mystical and not Profane. Females are here on Earth. They will pass as the Earth passes.

_If_ Jesus - I don't care: IF Buddha, IF Mohammed, IF Joseph Smith, IF the Pope, IF Zoraster - I simply don't care ... if any male can have union with the Divine, why can't women?

_MARCH_ : (Resigned. Open-hand gesture. Surrender: _how do I know?_ )

Are we left with just a divine Switcheroo?

God, did'ja use that line on all the Greenies?!

You're hopeless!

You're hapless!

Fine.

Fine.

Zav: Being sacred: our flesh bends that oxymoron. It's not Balance, it's Identity. Sameness and Otherness simultaneously. Multi-dimensional - aw, you're just too fucking stubborn!

Me? _You_ won't give up on Sacred Pussy. You're the one who can't accept flesh - that it dies, decays. Ever think you're just chasing the Pre-Ascendancy Dream of Eternal Youth? 'Fraid to die?

No. I _never_ thought of that.

Now, who's pissed?

You're just a dick-head.

Names! Names!

Who else will talk with you about this?

I've met some.

Some what - switcheroos? Ha.

Maybe. Who cares? There are women out there who love only their bodies. They don't switch back. Is that _Bad_?

Suppose Zav locked the gate?!

That's not the point.

Seems to be?!

No. Don't you see. When we go inward, slip, there's no in or out, no enter, exit. Because there are no lines, no boundaries. They're erased.

_Erased?_ I know the boys smoke, but you?

Gee, Priscilla, your body's more potent than blossom.

(Hard pause. Unhappy thought.)

That's what happens? He can _inhale_ you?

Even with the kids, you still do it?

_Especially_ because of the kids. Look, it happened, really, truly knock-my-socks-off happened _because_ of the kids.

Okay. It was _spiritual_ for me too. Kids are spooky.

I don't think ....

Wrong, again?

Not wrong.

Then?

Incomplete.

Fuck you!

I'm me. You're you. She's her. There's no _We_ – no _The Embrace_. It's just abusing language.

But suppose language _is_ conjuration?

Suppose the moon _is_ made of green cheese. _Childish._

But suppose Cilla's clit is a spiritual source, a spiritual force – if God is Pater Omnipotens how can there not be Mater Omnipotens?

If I'm truly a God as is Revealed, don't I create "from nothing" – isn't that clear? Men have always known: women are nothing. If not this, then there is no Truth!

Hold it! Stop! – It's not this or that, not a choice: women are, men are: have been forever: will be: accept! your cock is just a note on the scale of your skin: her pussy, a keyboard. That there _is_ music - to be made, created: _Celestial_. Doesn't that excite you?

Frankly, _no_.

Why, oh, why are we driven to talk like this?

You're driving. I'm just the passenger.

(Another beer. Another toke.)

Maybe I should just suck my own dick!

There's barely enough; just the way it is. _Suppressed fulmination_.

Okay.

No, you don't mean "okay," you mean "I'm not listening, anymore."

Really?

Really.

(Checking the time.)

_PRISSY_ : It's not just that men control the world, you know. It's that they alone imagine: _imagine_ they're alone ... _PRICKS!!_

I thought that was your _sine qua non_?

_Touché_.

(Priscilla pushes her cup towards Lily's - the code for imminent departure.)

Next week?

Of course.

# CHAPTER K

Xer returned from March Forbar's funeral. Came home: his apartment: sat down. There was just too many things happening this day; he had to sit down. Had watched the crowds: students, family, many townsfolk, others from the Curious; watched and realized that none had the answer. Of all, most not the priest. "Dies irae ..." in the strange incomprehensible tongue of Catholic priests. Xer didn't need to read the translation, the sound was horrendous enough.

The _Smithys_. Many. Noticeable by their white dresses. Almost angrily contrasted to the Cat's black: all black – shoes, socks, hats ... "Undies? Do we, Pater?" ... he knew for certain that the priest wore ugly undies.

The _Smithys_. And "her" too.

But no one knew: _Who is Lacy Lily?_

_The Box_ was cinders. Where would she emerge? Almost, he almost had the self-analytical: _Why am I sure she will come back?_

As with this day, she seemed inevitable: as inevitable as Death. Sin and Death.

"Is it a sin to them?" This thought jumped on him, came from out of nowhere and simply plastered itself ontop his shoulders; instinctively he flinched.

Worming its way in, it tunnels to the Light: "Of course not!"

Xer now understands, "We sin so they have grace." So sudden and so solidly logical, so smoothly linked that it is not shock as much as the amazement of first discovery: like honey inside the honeycomb.

He cannot face what only his soul fears from this revelation: _He died so they could be born_.

Should she have known? Or, had she known even before she did know? "Ascension. That's what we want. All the Cats want is mortal sin!" and she laughs; her Sisters laughed; all the walls of _Smith_ rocked and thundered; the bricks quivered and the sideways quaked.

Xer waits. She has to appear, somewhere. He's certain in his gut if not lucid in his mind. The theological subtleties, the spiritual distinctions, these never were his; don't have to be.

_Waiting_. A wait like a steady breeze, then, _Gush!_ In fly four guys, short of breath, excited, heady: "Lily's back!" without even words; glasses dropped, steins rapidly emptied, shots thrown back, snorts of blossom all around ... in some place, down another street, around the next corner, up a stair-case: if there had been a navigator, someone with geographical skills, or just anyone with a penchant for details, they would have known that they were on _Smith_ 's campus: ("Impossible!")

"JUST ONE LOOK!" already shaking the rafters; not only her summons, but their response ... she as precious as ever, possibly more so, for there was a glow to her, not just a sheen nor a glitter but a glow: goldish, whitish, violet – it all depended upon whom you'd ask, but no one was surveying ... upon her divan, the spread of her legs, the kiss of her southern lips, and then! _Then!_ – was it Heaven come to Earth? Or, a visitation by Angels? Few Cats cared to frighten themselves by considering Demons and Incubi and Succubi and Fallen Angels ... for there were now ten Lilies: all in array, all beckoning, and _Lo!_ A trumpet blared. A note so thrilling sounded, not a note but a heart-beat, as if all were one heartbeat, a beat of thumping lust, but a beat so harmonious, so strong, yet pleasant, so comforting as it compelled: they all came up, and as they stepped there were ten more and then ten more and ten more, for as many as came so there was one: _Lily_ : for each: _Just One Look!_ ... the passionate odor, the fragrance so sublime it cloaked the dying: for they came, each _looked_ , and the look was piercing: looked _at_ them and pierced their hearts: pierced as if stabbed – indeed, they fell onto their Lily: were consumed by her beauty, her pleasure, the kiss of her lips ... stabbed, piked, speared, impaled, the upward shiv: every action of every stripe, each his own, falling as if upon his own sword: dying in the rapture of erotic ecstasy!

As he expired, Xer saw what he knew he had known: Lillian. _Lillian is Lacy Lily_

The girls – for girls they still were: Virgins most – even now, for it was known to these: these who had been Selected, that intimacy with a Cat was not intimacy at all, but its opposite: the final offering of one's self: ultimate humility.

In this humbling spirit Lily moves to her Cat; expertly and swiftly severs what is sacramentum: his cock, balls and all: removing from his body that which is symbol, sign and reality of what she is to offer her Eternal Husband: offer him All – offered through offering him Nothing: "Cats are nothing." A Temple First Truth.

....................................

Within _The Embrace_ this ancient tale throbs once again. "Why did they have to re-live this? We could just as easily have told them."

"Better to ask, why have we had to be revived like this? ... Who are they, _really_ , truly?"

Four-Square: re-lived, reviving what is, what was, what will always be present as _The Embrace_. That there is always, will always, was always: _Ascensions_ – not mechanically, not by a divined necessity, just as what is: a Spiraling: never up, never down, always up, always down: this which defines Presence, the spiraling of " _What is, is not!_ "

This image, this thought, this which is the Presence and so the Other, the Not-Presence: that which is Courting and Coupling/Communing and Embracing: In and Out: diastole and systole: at once living, at once dead: this image once thought once manifested is the manifestation, itself – at this Moment: _The Embrace_ Ascended: Ultimately ... Zav and Lilith are born now and forever: _intimates_.

(Mark: "1, 2, 3, 4 ... you, me, she, we: _What?!_ ")

# CHAPTER 28

"Look, haven't you figured it out, yet?"

"It's always figuring to you, isn't it?!"

"Yeah, maybe, but you've always read me wrong." He wished that he had put a sneer into that, but it came out too confessional.

"Come on! Toot! Toot! and all this Blast! crap from Lilith lately. What's happening, the whole world's falling apart?"

"Ooops! Maybe things are really going Bad." He did manage the slash of sarcasm. _Why do I want to kill the bastard?_

"I need a thirst. You?" not waiting for an answer; moving into the recreation area, up to the Big Wet; pulling out two; lately, Zav's taken to thick, almost molasses-like meads ... Mark's, as always, just piss.

It had been the break in action that he wanted. _Ascended assholes!_ There was as much bitterness in the drink as in his heart. He wished that he could swim up the murky stream and slide into the bottle – smart enough to know that he simply wants to escape!

"So, you want to know what's Ascended?" coming on a self-amused air. Not intended but for his own amusement, "I'll tell you," accepting the bottle, "Greenies. That's what, Greenies!" licking his lips with the words in between deep sucks on the glass teat.

Zav grimaces: one of those half-grimaces which isn't sure of itself: _What to say?_ it conveys.

Finished before Zav is quarter-down, letting the empty swing from his hand as he talks: "It was always _them_." He stopped, not that he wasn't sure who _them_ was, rather, the short sentence said all that he had come to learn is male wisdom.

_Naw!_ – but Mark's ears were plugged.

Like the cork it was: "I figured it out, right away. Just in pre-Courting classes. That there was _NO_ balance." Huge sigh; hand raising bottle wanting to slam and shatter it – Zav feels the feeling: "That there never was even the slightest intention to balance." Flips the bottle onto the couch; any couch; that the couch caught it was incidental: he turns and looks at Zav, a look which flips into a stare, a stare into an effort to peer ... but all he does is impale himself!

"Freaking boobies!" shouted as he stands up and stomps his way to the bathroom.

Door slams.

" _Sex without having sex_ – did I miss something?"

Mark was long gone. Zav had been puttering around the house – he knew Lil wouldn't be home tonight. Just in how she left: _distracted_.

It was a one-man play: he grasped that he was its only audience – but, then, he didn't; for him _The Embrace_ was ever-present.

Arms in motion, legs walking about, at times a pace, others a strut, sitting up, sitting down, in and out of a room, catching the display of remarkless sky and day: no adjectives except for his own condition: _Bad_.

_Xer certainly understood_ – and the play commenced – You doubt that? That runt. Yeah, you didn't think I remembered, but I do, everything. Adjectives. For everyone. Tall. Short. Brown skin. Black. Real green eyes. Small teats. Thundering boobs! ... Ha. But I gotta admit, so I will, that's not it. But it was a clue. I mean, if I willed it, it happened. You knew that, didn't you? Sure. If I stared and peered, it happened. Lilith became Lillian or Lily or Prissy or whomever I wanted. That's what's freaking out my bud. Sure as hell freaks me out. I don't care if I should've been prepared. How the hell can something as cryptic as that crap had prepared me? "Sex without having sex" – who the hell? ... and _The Embrace_ is now fully present: he can see them, _Shit!_ he says to them; right-arm extended, finger-pointing: because I willed you here! (Do I want to hear their applause?) Ah, Gods and Goddesses, it's all simile and metaphor. Ain't I smart?! ... _But if I'm so Smithy smart then why aren't they all Ascended?_ ... He wills them to disappear. They do. He wills himself to disappear. _He does_.

Mark wanted the greenest of Greenies. Looking for one who hadn't bled yet. Not that he had litmus paper, "Insert. Pull out. Read." _Ha._ Not for the body, what he had was for the soul, the spirit – _Hell!_ I hate words!

"You know," glaring down at her, fully clothed, but as naked as he has been able to make her, "You know, you're to do whatever I want." He knows she is too green to grasp any kind of subtlety; to compare him to anyone else; to have discussed what he was doing now with any other Sister because she hadn't done anything like this – Oh, Mark was beside himself with ... with: in his own mind, the mind now also March: "Evil," without an exclamation; he wants this to be as Evil as he can make it; having come in the last while to grasp why such a notion as Evil had never been dreamt by _The Embrace_ ... "No Original Sin" – how truly stupid were we? "That's all there is, babe. That's all there is," is what he was saying to himself as he smiles at her and she smiles back, excited that such a wonder is happening to her, that she has been Selected – so he told her – to advance quickly, to surpass her classmates, to move into the Higher Realm, to bring to life a Greater Truth ... words and ideas which she had no familiarity with, no understanding of, which were new to her: but he, "Ancient One" as he disclosed; whispering to her with the sweetest of tone, in a breath pure wonderment as his words open her eyes, opens her soul – his touch, the gentlest of caresses of her cheek – delighted she is; ready for him; ready to do as he requests ....

Zav had penned it on a Friday morn; had it to the calligrapher and back in time for their weekly Moment. Friday nights were as he could not remember them never being. The night for Coupling time; reserved. Not that they didn't Couple other days or hours or minutes – _Blast! Toot_ and _Toot!_ he playfully purses his lips and swats his hand in exultation: they had Coupled in a rhythm without description ... he exhales deeply this Moment as he reads: the words appearing and resting in their briefness: "I and you are metaphors. We, simile."

Lil read the note; put it down too quickly: Zav was mildly shocked more than hurt or confused. It was then that he realized her Ascension.

Mark chanted, evoking the magical presence: "You are nothing," as she lays there, blissful in her baredness: a nakedness which he peeled back into fully-bare, pushed towards invisibility; "You are everything," as in the ritual of the Moment: in her, out of her: each penetration and withdrawal intensified by his liturgical words: words which eroded the separateness between them: she as a female, he as a male; she as a woman, he as a man: "Nothing," "Everything" ... her bones ached, her flesh was beyond raw, the searing pain had ceased, there was an absolute jolt of numbness: her body had long ago ceased to be her body: his in and out of her had ceased to be but the ebb and flow of her own presence, a presence which was slowly, but of sharp awareness, slowly being consumed – Oh, she had had images of seeping, of wetting, of being cloaked, but these had fallen away as her arms had, as her breasts had disappeared, as her backbone had been absorbed by his cock: not denied to her was this: his serpentine swallowing, of herself as being sucked into and through his cock: which was to him, "Innocence!": her offering herself as she had been trained, been taught, _Do whatever_ , and how was she to know, they asked, asking themselves what hadn't been asked for beyond Memory: the Embrace of _The Embrace_ feeling her dissipation, her etherealization, her misting up and into a puff which March inhales, upon her expiring breath: _Prissy so smug!_ so confident as females had always been confident! _Too confident!_ he laughs in the suck of his final breath: a tiny laugh: yet with the tinniest of tinys does he Ascend ... what only _The Embrace_ is present to: March's Ascension which is Mark's Descension: to the evocation and the presence of Evil: _Pure_ Evil: "You are nothing," final words; his _Amen_ : he watches her Obliteration.

Zav mulled over Xer's presence. _Did he want a Smithy? Was it important the he be Catholic?_ "How can I ever know?" riding exasperation; irritation; annoyance.

"You got to stop thinking about that. It's gone. Over. Blast it away!" herself irritated; annoyed.

"Blast this! _Blast that!_ Is this what it all comes to? For you. This, your Ascension? That there are only New Truths? Each day. Moment. What is it? Anything you want to be a Truth, is that it?"

She shakes her head in that "Mommy's said a thousand times not to do that" shake; toddler listening for the hundredth time and not getting it.

_Okay_. He wills them back; this the last time he ever wants to be present to _The Embrace_. _Okay._ I've studied. More than the others. You had something to do with this, I know. All this poet stuff. What can it be but your Memory. Really mine? _No sex_ , and all that? Something you wanted me to work on. Hell – and there is a Hell, you know. (That makes them squirm, he thinks; thinking that they know his every thought; but maybe, not? Hmmm.) _Hell is other people_ – what Ancient One said that?: someone of you gave me that; sure, Heaven is other people too. That's what Mark would say: who among you thought that?

The girls; women; females – see, it's this Original Sin stuff. Theory. Theology. Fact. _Whatever_. Who am I sounding like, now? Ha.

I got there, you know it, I know it; that's why you're here. But this is what I've got to say. What is my message. Why I've summoned you back: _Hear this_ – she didn't get it. Lilith. Prissy. Whatever woman. Inside you – you guys, you gals: whatever your presences. Understand, no, let's watch, watch together ... peer with me:

:it all has to be there. _That's the rub!_ Lifting off the layers, flimsy layers here in the warmth: Prissy's blouse; now her bra: pressing her palm against her breasts, delighted by its warmth; slipping off the skirt and the slip; panties, stockings; undressing and in the undressing so herself, at least her desire, allowing her Sister to roll back the layers: with her tongue rolling back the words which have separated them, rolling them back and inhaling them like clouds which are drawn down as fire from the sky: kisses and tender licks of her frightening neck: a touch of flesh which is pure light: it rises, it falls: the slightest touch of the tip of her tongue and there is an aura which surrounds them, bathes them: into her eyes which have widened into doors: into and through: down the flow of her flesh, kissing her breasts, fondling them, finding there a thousand kisses from a thousand Sisters: touches of desire, touches which have traveled long distances: miles: sighs: light years: tremblings ... upon her belly, which is upon _her_ belly, for every touch of her is a touch of herself: this the revelation: this the Ascension which is not word or thought among them during this Moment: this the inseparableness; the Truth that there is nothing but Unity, nothing but Oneness: that there is no male as metaphor; no Couple as simile: it rings from the rafters, this announcement that "Zav is nothing!" not a thing: not a sperm: not a zygote: not a child: not a presence: just a way of Remembering Her: of being Memory of Herself: this one self: this singular self: this Only Self: Without Which There is Not Other: into this otherlessness is Lilith/Priscilla/Lily/Prissy: all of which is Zav/Xer/March/Mark: all Otherless ... the thunder is unleashed: the clitoris is rubbed – _That's the rub!_

("The female is but only Switcheroo!")

# CHAPTER 29

"I'll tell her today," she said to herself, out loud and with a shy hand gesture; then poured another glass – liking to do it glass by glass ever since Lilith had gotten down on her, "Real down, Sister, I'm real down. You've got to stop all this drinking!" ... Glasses turned into bottles turned into vats: she laughs seeing herself swell-up and become a large vat of wine or a big cistern of beer or a huge distilled bottle – "The bulb type" flits through her brain – a bulbous body – accompanied by "like when you were so fat!" meaning pregnant with the twins: of booze, liquor, witch's brew, bad water: all words, all flitting, with them swatting at consciousness, entering a phase she seemed more to seek each day now, very aware to herself that she wants it, no longer those denials, the avoidances, the little games: Lilith had forced her – "Bitter? You bet I'm bitter, you bitch!" went unsaid; unconfessed; unfreed ... _sobriety_ : "What's so great about sobriety?" she did fling, not at Lilith but at March, "When I'm sober I realize how short your dick is!" ... but it never hurt him: can't hurt him!: her lament, a lamentable lament: a cry – she accepts "whimper" ... "You whimpering, miserable dried up old cunt!" ... so why be sober to that and you and _you_ and you? her finger pokes the air, her brain is perforated with each poke, not leaking out but sucking in, sucking in unconsciousness, sucking in the cool fresh breeze of black-out.

But she never told, because she never returned. Today, Cilla slipped inward in her own way; spread her soul and became a seeded egg for flowers on another dimension; slipped so far in that she was slipped out: _Hallelujah!_ she rejoices as she finds herself secure: watching them, observing them as she has observed them before – _Oh!_ she knows they never knew how observant she was: seeing green eyes where others saw none; catching the crudeness of the trick called "Africa" – _was I the only one to notice the walls were made of bricks the exact size_ (she had measured) _the precise size the infinitesimally precise size of all the other bricks in every college building_? (she came to accept her singularity) ... now, they wash her body, now they hold her hand patting it as if tapping out a message ("But only I know the esoteric Code!"), now they kneel beside her bed staring – how else to say it, staring, what some call peering – "Peering" she has heard it stated, heard it urged, heard it pronounced "the way to Truth" ... but she knows that she is the only one who ever peered.

: _how to tell her?_ That they're all wrong. Not just wrong, that they're Bad. As I've come to understand it. Not the jokester stuff of Zav. Not the fucked-brain idiocy of March. "And not _your clit is It!_ foolishness, either, Lil or Lily or Prissy or whoever you are, Sister!" She rolls Sister like steam blistering the air the day Zav's old monster transport broke down: sssssssssssssssssssssssssssttttttttttttt!

_Let me tell you_ : you all think I was just a drunk –sure, let's look at that: _just a drunk!_ Sure, but that means all you are is _not a drunk_. I'm drunk with life, willing to let it inside me – _Oh, excuse me_ , I forgot, first – FIRST TRUTH! – _ha_ – life is drunkenness, not walking a straight line, not a balance – aw, Mark you were always too screwed in too tight! – it's wobble and faltering and falling-down and wetting your pants and forgetting your body, there, that's it: _forgetting_ , you all try too hard to remember or to member, to put something together ... don't cry for me – _Get away from my bed if you're going to weep!_ – never had dignity, none of you, just like robots, think you'd all do well on a Martian Commune – goddess! I'm cracking myself up! .... _Lil!_ Damn you. You ain't his friend. _Were you mine?_ Not his lover. _Were you mine_? So, you thought going inward meant he became you, his old metaphor crap, so you looked at me and said: Do I need him? ... Awful stuff! Who was the alky, then? You took me like an addict takes the implant: continual injection, just playing with my clit, enwrapped in my clit, exalting my clit, examining probing pressing massaging driving me insane with pleasure but driving me – _where_?

"We have both. We have the cave and the torch! All he has is simile!" – how can I ever forget who was crazy then? ... _Why couldn't I have shown you your mistake?_

:black-out:

March played out the scene: tricking the kids into believing that he was struggling to master his emotions; but he wasn't, there simply weren't any.

Lilith was seated behind the family ring which circled the bed. Each child blew out a candle. It wasn't night so it wasn't dark. But a dusty shade, thick astral cloak settled over Lilith: swirled down from up there, gracefully rolled down her sides to her feet: _black-out_ :

Zav folds his arms, tightens them, in his mind he is hugging Cilla: _At last_ , he hears her whisper, _slipping inside!_

# CHAPTER 30

"So, it's just us."

"Back to two."

They were uncomfortable with the thought, more, the imagined reality.

_But it's not just two as we were two_ , each thought but didn't say. She reaches over and tenderly touches his lips. She is his tongue.

They spent the day in a way Communing folks who have been Coupled for a long – _very long_ \- time often did – without much conversation. No, lots of conversation, not _just talk_. ("Ancient Ones!")

They puttered in the garden. A "something to do" which became more between them once the kids had all gone. For him it had become metaphor, but he didn't intellectualize it: he preferred being moved by the more animated feeling that he was metaphor for the garden: as he picked up the hose or plunged in a spade or plucked out a weed – "What's a weed?" sometimes fringed with anger, "A rose's a weed if you don't like it!" She never gave quarter. – all these actions, the garden flowing into him, the turned earth that is his soul, the weed, part of himself which he just felt the world did not understand: especially her!

Lilith simply liked the comfort of rest which was reward at day's end. She cleaned up thoroughly. She has come to accept – no, not accept, to tolerate in the most toxic sense of the word – tolerate his lounging in his swatted yet dusty pants; had gotten him to leave his boots on the porch, but she knew she'd never transform him: "Boys like playing in the dirt": she oft recalled this motherly wisdom.

On this day, which was not distinguished in any way from their so many other days, decades now: almost six together: it is night, they are in bed: both share the familiar feeling that they are newly planted bulbs in the flower bed: this image floats in front of them, is a reflection; each turns as slightly as seedlings do to the shifting sun, this moment, moonlight: _smile_.

How many years now? This preparation for forever-dreaming? This way of Coupling which slips-inside which the other two: now forever-dreaming: had yet to share? It had been a long cooled question: _Why_? They simply adjusting to the insight that the four-square was more mystically anchored than any could have, would have guessed when they first were aware of their four-ply knot.

For these two, it, again, just happens. One waking moment, one glance, and the step into consciousness which makes them aware that they are waking as they had never woken before. It was not "Blast!" Rather an inaudible except to the soul breath. The coming to a moment of startle wherein they exist as common breathing: holding their breaths at this moment's edge, aware that the exhale meant that one was not whom one was ever to be again.

As first such, this had been decades ago. Right now, it is that slight, subtle, supple orientation of all points: body, mind, soul, spirit ... just a tilt this way, a tug that way, etc., and they begin to dream together.

"Even this is changing." He was deadly serious.

"How do you mean?" Not that she hadn't given it some thought, just that it had not been as strong a distraction.

"We're moving – is that the right word? _Are there any right words_ ," he says before she can say what she always says, "Ha. Words are the only keys we have, I'm right there. I've always been right there!" wanting to sound more triumphal then he does; but he doesn't want to bore himself, either.

"Keys. Ladders. Catapults. Trap doors. Sink-holes. Call them what you want – containers, better." She halts; halts herself, wants to go elsewhere.

"No more metaphors? No more similes?"

She cheeks an indulging smile.

He shrugs.

"It's time we're born again."

Who said that?

You? Me?

Both?

Are we pregnant?

Betcha!

Two old bodies. They had accepted that small adjective. Knew that its monosyllabic sound betrayed the eonic prophecy it carried.

_Old as in Ancient_.

Flesh which became an archaeological map. He tracing on her not just memory of their shared awakeness, but of the forgetfulness of all "space and time." She fingering the folds, the wrinkles, the loosenings which even the most advanced rejuvenating potions could not refresh. _Intimates_ : it had been this acceptance of their loosening, their mutual loosening, which was their aging, their maturation, their becoming Ancient: ascending, descending, spiraling: as they aged together it is _only they_ who are: mythos-weaving: she who only knew him, and he, her: being the in and out of one another: _intimates_.

: _intimates_ – it never became a word, neither beheld with an acclamation, "My intimate!" – but it could have been spoken: for the transit into this fresh Spiraling was characterized by the loss of all names for each other; all endearments of the most intimate kind; there was a mating beyond ego; more than a simple transfer of bodily parts, of habitual insights, of sighs and inexpressible yearnings ... "It is the Oneness," spoken by that which was now One. No longer _The Embrace_. Knowing that Ascension was always as it was never. Yet, in the Oneness pulsing into so many individualities: this the insight, the embrace, the throb of Oneness.

here, intimate as only individuals can be. For intimacy is being, an isness, an eternality: it is never not ascending nor descending.

back then: in the Courting – mashing bodies, so it was thought, so as to generate the Ascended Couple, the Cosmic We, what _The Embrace_ believed was the Revelation of the next Ascension .... astral laughing now, a titter of pleasure, a guffaw of amusement, that they had been "Oh, so close!"

"Ancient One!"

"Ancient One!"

"Imagine!" so enchanted are they that just their words and images flow, spiraling into visions and descending into hardness, rising into time and space: into various but distinct times and spaces: creating: "The tones, the hues." "The softness. The hardness." "The living; the dead." Manifesting their Intimacy: flowing in and out: beyond and beyond beyond: coupling beyond coupling beyond communing beyond embracing beyond living beyond dying ... beyond: _simply here_.

# PART 4: INTIMATES

# (!)

: _words_ \- all that we have to share, accept them these sounds which are our breathings come into you as there is the imagining, of an us and a we, a you and a me, a they, the ineluctable I: image it as eye, seeing, words, these are the magic, the mysterious force, what makes the presence present ... feel, understand the fullness of these words: how much the babe is the fullness of the word, a simple word: love: but more, a word which is urgent, urging, ur-grounding: primal: a word of creational fire: firk and fuck and cock and cunny: ah, how the fire has left the flesh: know from us with these words that flesh is a candle, the wick the presence, the we but the blending, at once one but two: as two yet one: fuller: not less, not a diminishment: yes, a consummation, a consuming: this is what the intimate is: consumer: but where is the flash? – it is in the eating which is a ravishing, a ravenous feasting:

: _feasting_ – how else but the feting, the festival? Lilith who has been all seasons, all time, who has been me, and _me_ : Zav, who has been all things, all spaces ... intimates: we speak, I speak: it is dreaming – to you this comes because of the spiraling, the Spiraling, the allocation, the permeation, the profusion of presence not just in four-square, not just in quadrants of identity, more fully as the Flow spirals and the Spiraling flows: ah, words! images, imaginings, indeed, metaphor and simile: oxymorons: what was Zav but Lil's oxymoron? This the hunger which fills, is not to be filled, is the conduit on the Spiraling (which is never but spiraling) ... this our dreaming: we know this: I know this: _I know this, too:_

: _dreaming_ – my beloved, have we not dreamed all their dreams? have we not taken to our wakeful presences the joy, the pain, the delirium, the whirling of creating? Our kisses the press of all lips? Our embracing the squeeze of dying gone blissed? Our coupling the eruption of presence beyond and through and within and without? ... Wakefulness, listen children, is the cock as brush, the cunny as canvas: paint your-selves and in such artfulness play with the oneness of paint and canvass: with the bountifulness of imagining: Court, Couple, Create:

: _intimacy_ – cunny consuming cock, cock consuming cunny: Speak! Dream! _Imagine!_

("Spiraling!")

( _Bullshit_.)

# )*(

It was as if the air had changed, as if it were now a conduit, no, more a bodily member: not distinct like an arm but like emotions: the touch of an all enveloping presence: all the bodily members united by that something called a "feeling," yet, it was like touch, yet not tactile, more, like the touch of sight, yet, it was still other: stranger, maybe peculiar would be the word they would have chosen: _a lick_ ; but all this was not of a sharply conscious moment nor was it of a vivid conscious memory, as if they knew the date and the time, rather, it just happened, yet, again, having happened they more fully "knew" themselves as before it had happened: sighfully, one of the joys of this change is that they did not have to talk about it, merely think, no, again, not just thinking as in plotting or planning or analyzing but as in a glance: all their knowledge and knowing in a glance ... when the grandkids came, then it was most robust: for they "fell into" or just started "playing" into this same relationship: especially the children who were still innocent, not not-guilty, just still within a world of magical imagining: as deliciously imagining the worst as the best – killing their sibling! or crushing insects! or other such delights of the darker presence of themselves: instantly as magical with a smile, a kiss, a hug welcoming everyone, celebrating everything: playing inside or with or around and over this imagining – it was something that just happened as the littlest grandkids came over ... yet, ah, the ever "yet" – if Zav and Lil would have had one word to speak about it all it was "yet" – that versatile word, so plastic, so malleable: connect it to so many things: other words, experiences, feelings – meaning, additional, more, not quite, to the contrary: a good word for their imagining ... and as they were present to each other it was this "yet" which defined them: the "yet" of what was yet-to-be-imagined, for when they had awoke to this new stage of intimacy, they quickly grasped that it had happened, this intimacy, because they had imagined, but more – another "yet!" – it had happened because they had been imagined: this the intensity of the moment: it was, indeed, embracing – within which, their embrace, they slipped into this intensity and it slipped out and over them: communed them: into communion – the sharpest, most searing, clearly delimited, noted in every conceivable detail was each's individuality: never so aware had she been of him as not her, and he of her: it was the magnificence of the presence of the other's singular breathing ... ah, they had worked in all their phase to find the common breath: in _Courting_ to be in harmony with the general breathing; in _Coupling_ , with the other's breath: spousal; in _Communing_ , with that of _The Embrace_ , again, the breath of Ages ... now, it is totally other, a different direction – no, wrong words, inept imagery: they were living the Spiraling: the multi-dimensional presence of one another: but most intensely of _this_ other: _he_ as individual in the sense of idiosyncratic: the misshapen tooth, the outright ugly scrunch of her left pinkie toe, the buffoonish eye-brows which puffed and fluffed, the checker-board spots on hands, the ransacking hordes of moles and skin tears: no longer were they applying cosmetics: not of removal or coverage – they just were allowing their bodies to happen, to erupt, to molt: for it was in such a moment of insightful laughter – at each other, at one's self, that they realized how minutely different each was from the other ... it was the glory of decay, the festooning of infirmities, the celebration of diminishment: which was, so they mutually and simultaneously grasped, the Spiraling's code: reading on their bodies the message of their transit, of the Next Step, not stopping to bother with precise words: "Ascension?" sure, why not?: _Throb_ ... but it was _intensity_ , this which is the change if other were to observe and search for a useful descriptor for change: that they were creational, alone and together ... she watches him shuffle – for he was dragging a right foot these Octogenarian days – out into the garden, there she observes his play: the conjuring of bugs, the eliciting of beauty, they prestidigitation of joy! _full blossom and bloom!_ – for it was a world he was creating, not "the world" if there ever was such a thing so the thought came to her one day, but "his" world and "our" world ... herself, he has watched, sitting together, as she claps and sets into flight a lonesome dove, a messenger of desire, drawn from inside herself: flies an aerial line to a grandson, one in doubt about how to love a woman of his desire: Lilith waves a hand in semi-circle and an opening is created, an astral window, through which the dove flies: into and alights upon the sleeping boy, there transforming into his lover: and they converse, speak with the heart and tongue of Ancient Ones: embrace in their sleep, kiss and depart to wakefulness: upon his face Zav sees the amazed happiness of the dreamer-awakened: the Kiss of Lover Found in his eyes; _he_ departs to find _her_ ... it is for them the gift to stop time, turn it back, bend it forward: for they have arrived – arisen, slid into: what are words? – but they are at those mobius points - and they see so many - points where there are such fluxes in time and space such that multi-dimensional presences engage, emerge, flow ... back to their Courting days, sharing together the desperateness of Mark: his bold, mad-cap, insanity driven desire to realize his Warrior's Quest: to capture and control Nothingness – oh, the pain! _Zav is Lil's pain_ : the Obliterating pain they take and hold: a sharing between them, as tactile as a wooly blanket: flap it about and set it free: floating it into another time and space; yet, remembering Cilla: "Sweet Priscilla!" who was ever all that Mark was, _both_ warriors: meeting so as not to meet, but to joust, contend, battle: nothing as wicked in his arsenal as drinking was in hers: she with the potion, the Elixir of Evil: they watching her pour it into sleeping Mark's ear: bathing his astral body: mouth, abluting feet, baptizing his head: "Nothing! _Nothing!_ Nothing!" she chants over the sleeping body: a body which never awoke: _Ah_! how these two move through all that was their plotted life: all the x's and y's and z's: now in and through another dimension: that of intense intimacy: so intense that it can no longer be plotted: together they begin to imagine their departure, their transit: feel and share in mind and thought and gesture that this world which they have created, both apart and together: this world so apt for words: this world where there was so much ever unresolved: _All being metaphor and simile!:_ so much the clash and clang of the one and the many: of the individual and the collective: of the couple and the Communio ... a world of Fire! so they applaud: a delightful fire: seething through their intensity like smoke are all the desires they had ever desired: the thickness of Courting, the wondrous bafflement of the body, itself: that time when no one truly knew limits, nor fullness, nor Bigness, sharing between them the majestic ecstasy of all whom they have Loved and who loved them: bodies akimbo, interlaced, meshed together – so thick, they can hardly breathe! But, _Ah!_ the Fire, the Glorious Flaming which the flesh can be, so they share: into the refining Furnace of _Coupling_ – _How else?!_ – all their years melting down and casting: children, hopes, fears, dreams – casting themselves in hope that they will cast their divineness: casting their flesh together: pounding it, poking it, piercing – _Ah!_ The piercings: she and he in profound amusement: reliving the thousand approaches, the innumerable grapplings, the unspeakable ins and outs: like sponges soaking up the leaping flames, of their drivenness: each, at this sharing, so profoundly amazed at how they had forged – without sharply conscious intent – the purity of the other's individuality ... and here in awe before the revelation, for it came like thunder and stilled the air, the revelation that Mark and Priscilla were parts of their individuality: (" _Are!_ "): awed and shocked: turning in this astral Spiraling and observing how it was Lilith who bore Mark within and Zav so with Cilla: they two souls yet to be fully born, but yet what Lilith and Zav's birth into Intimacy is all about ....

_Intensity_ : fire in its suckling unto air: not into cold: but into breath, for this is what being human is: from flaming to breeze: so they are imagining: themselves – _how can we share this forever-dreaming?_ – imagining themselves as candles: unblemished beeswax: being wicks, becoming one wick: being imagined as One, but transforming beyond, a true change of substance, a movement into motionlessness, all which only intensity can begin to describe: they are intense each for the other: intensity which is exploding through each, molecule by molecule, atom by atom: and then imploding, pulling down the flaming and intensifying it so that they become airy: not just part of the air, but Air: the substrate of human presence: appearing in air because they are air to all those who love them: air which is the fuel for dreaming: that coupling which links all ages and bodies: all hearts beating; it is this the pump drawing up the water of deep sleeping: slaking the thirst of the ever-journeying dreamer ... so, it has been for these two: who now call themselves by every name but in intimacy as _Lilith_ and _Zav_ : these two who are the breath under your words: for it is your awareness, your presence in which is enfolded their presence: your singularity which is the breath of Oneness: here, as intimates so is the presence you share with them created:

Breathe.

