Define your problem crisply and bluntly, my mothers have always taught me. Meditate on the truth that the universe is a problem-solving machine, and that you always stir up hidden forces to work in your behalf when you provide the universe with a beautiful problem to solve. Then relax with perfect confidence and make yourself available for the solution to find you.

Using this artful technique, I tracked down the collector of antiquities within a week. First I composed a precise description of the person I wanted, the nature of our interaction, and the money that would come my way. Next I incubated a dream about how to bring this person into my life. In two of my dreams that night I was hanging out in a certain cafe in Santa Cruz, Caffi Pergolesi.

My third step was to go do in waking life what I had done in my dreams. Stealing all the time away from the Sanctuary I could, I parked myself at Pergolesi and waited. During my third watch I met a forty-year-old antiques dealer who became obsessed with my ability to tell her what she was thinking and to prognosticate her future. In return for me providing these unofficial services (which ultimately led to her making three lucrative finds she would never have stumbled across without me), she connected me with an associate from Carmel who was seriously interested in the artifact I had to sell.

It all happened so easily, I couldn't help but interpret it as a sign to proceed with my plan. This helped quell the doubts that had begun to creep in about whether I was doing the right thing.

It wasn't the annihilation of the splotch I felt queasy about. Not in the least. That was a righteous quest I regarded as my birthright. But I was having trouble rationalizing the theft and sale of the Grail. I knew that for my mothers, it was precious beyond imagining. They believed it possessed a magical mojo that could dramatically enhance the link between Goddess and anyone who touched it. And though I was bent on waging a secret holy war with them, I also loved them with all of my surgically repaired heart.

My forehead belonged to me, which gave me the inalienable right to do with it as I saw fit; the Grail did not.

Unless. Unless I really had been Mary Magdalen in a previous incarnation. In which case the cup of destiny was mine.

So was I or was I not Mary Magdalen? Was I or was I not the long-prophesied avatar of the Pomegranate Grail? As was true of every other aspect of my life, I had always been of two minds about those questions.

My mothers never expressed the slightest doubt that I was the Chosen One. I'd studied all the hoary texts, and indeed it seemed that my story fulfilled every detail of the ancient oracle. And through the years I had found myself, in countless dreams and meditative visions (more than a few in Melted Popsicle Land and the Televisionarium), vividly acting out scenes from the life of a girl and woman I thought of as Mary Magdalen. Some of these scenes, it's true, I had read or heard about before my mystical extrapolation of them. But many others were unrecorded in the herstories of the Pomegranate Grail. No one, for example, could confirm or deny my assertion that I sometimes wore the foreskin of Jesus as a ring on the middle finger of my left hand.

On the other hand, my mothers had pounded home to me the dangers of hubris with the same relentlessness with which they'd programmed me to believe I was the exalted messenger of Persephone. My ministry would not thrive, they assured me, if I recapitulated the sins of the patriarchy--that is, if as a charismatic leader I felt I was better than everyone and thought I was immune to the laws of karma. They'd trained me, furthermore, to have a healthy (not knee-jerk) skepticism towards all claims of transcendent glory and authority. Mine was not a blind faith. While I loved sacred magic, I always made damn sure it was the real thing before I gave myself to it.

Under the guidance of my mothers--and maybe because that's the way Goddess made me--I became and still am a raging contradiction: a logical mystic, a faithful doubter, a scientific pragmatist powered by myth and poetry.

Was I Mary Magdalen? Was I the female messiah? The answer was yes and no. Not yes when I was in an inflated, thaumaturgic mood and no when I was in a hard-ass, realistic frame. The answer was always yes and no, emphasis on and. In other words, both yes and no were true at the same time. Yes being true didn't make no untrue, and vice versa.

Reincarnation was an objective fact; the exact same "spirit" that inhabited the form of Mary Magdalen was now animating my body; the Pomegranate Grail was an ancient mystery school that had secretly preserved the occult feminine mysteries during the dark ages of patriarchy; I was now preparing to finish the mission that was foiled two thousand years ago ...

AND

Reincarnation was an unprovable theory; Mary Magdalen was a great teacher with whom I had tremendous resonance if not shared consciousness; the Pomegranate Grail was a source of healing inspiration even if it suffered from delusions of grandeur; and I was perhaps nothing more than a bright young girl being pumped full of projections by smart but frustrated idealists.

I had no choice but to apply this method to every self-inquiry. Was I a blessed exception with a special gift? Or just another narcissistic nobody in a world full of narcissistic nobodies? Was it my job to spread love and healing to everyone I encountered? Or else to ruthlessly destroy every illusion and prejudice? Should I strive to transcend or avoid every experience that brought me pain? Or should I embrace pain as my teacher and express gratitude for its power to motivate me? Yes and no.

As I contemplated the prospect of stealing and selling the Grail, I arrived at an exhilarating new edge. Though I had long felt a sneaky respect for my double-mindedness, this new application of the principle, in a situation that would have dramatic practical consequences, seemed to have ripened it into a new maturity. All these years I had borne the subliminal expectation that one day my contradictions would drop away and I would see with a unified eye and heart. Now I was finally ready to dispense with that infantile delusion.

I considered the probability that my double-mindedness was not a wounded state needing to be healed. It was a profoundly accurate reflection of the blessed nature of life on Earth.

Crucifixion. I understood that term in a fresh way. To be authentically and fully alive is to be symbolically crucified. No. More than that. To be fully and authentically alive is to be crucified without feeling tortured. Or else to be crucified and feel tortured, but exult that you have fully awakened to and accepted the heroic assignment of every single person who incarnates on this planet, which is to be eternally torn between heaven and earth, between spirit and body, between light and shadow.

Only the inbetween is real.

I saw that the doctrine of the crucifixion as transmogrified by the Christian church was half-baked. It lacked Magdalen's--my?--contribution. As usual, the patriarchy crippled the feminine element of the archetype, then overliteralized what was left, leaving a garish cartoon. "Jesus died for our sins"--what tired old redundant bullshit! Sun gods had already been getting sacrificially slaughtered for eons by the time my consort and I showed up.

You'd never know it by asking Peter or Paul, but Jesus and I actually had the intention of unveiling a fresh, new show. "Get this, friends," we intimated. "We're here to abolish the one-dimensional myth of the solo hero and replace it with the template of the divine collaborators. Two crafty souls together, male and female as equals, aiding and abetting each other's gutsy quest to live gracefully in heaven and earth at the same time."

The further implication of this innovation was that if there was indeed more than one god-inflamed avatar, why couldn't there be many more? We refuted the tradition of there being just one towering messiah who alone, among multitudes of plain old ordinary humans, possessed the key to the kingdom of heaven. Jesus and I were, in other words, the Great Examples, not the Great Exceptions. Anyone could master the art of being both god and human. Indeed, that was the divine plan.

I became drunk on this insight. It was by no means the first time I'd generated a unique philosophical eruption that fell outside the dogma of the Pomegranate Grail. But it felt bigger than any of my previous apostasies. It wasn't the result, as had usually been the case, of my polemical intellect straining to sharpen its claws. It was a creative distillation and apotheosis of my visceral life experience.

What if? I began to ruminate. What if there's more where this came from? What if there's a flood of new wrinkles primed to pour out of me? And what if these novelties, rather than being sour and irrelevant departures from the Pomegranate Grail party line, hail the emergence of a new covenant that will reinvigorate our ancient order? Maybe it was my job not merely to disseminate the neglected teachings, but to shatter the mold: to mutate and expand them.

If that were the case, I could think of no better symbolic act than to lose the Grail. Maybe it really was infused with mojo that could literally charge up anyone who touched it. But might it not also have the dubious power to keep believers locked into outworn ways of linking up to the Goddess?

I headed straight into the ironic hypocrisy at the heart of the Pomegranate Grail. The form of Goddess that its members worshiped above all others was Persephone, She who demands ceaseless change as the price of eternal life. And yet they had clung to the old principles, the old texts, the old prophecies for millennia. It was understandable, utterly forgivable: to be conservative and preservative in the face of the repressive horrors of the patriarchy. The sacred secrets could not have survived any other way.

But now I had arrived: the avatar of the Queen of Death; servant of She who lovingly breaks the old containers to make way for the shock of the new. There could be no doubt that I had been Mary Magdalen, because only the reborn Mary Magdalen could understand and articulate Persephone's latest dispensation: the radical logic of yes AND no; the annihilation--no, the transcendence--of the infantile Us versus Them.

"For what sort of mind wrestling with what sort of issue is the ideology of oppositionalism so useful?" wrote James Hillman, one of the geniuses I had discovered in my quest for wisdom beyond the canon my mothers had provided. "The heroic ego," he answered himself, "who divides so he can conquer. Antithetical thinking, found by Albert Adler to be a neurotic habit of mind, belongs to the will to power and the masculine protest."

I was without a doubt Mary Magdalen because I had mastered the perspective that allowed me to see I was both Mary Magdalen and not Mary Magdalen.

And since I was Mary Magdalen, the holy bowl was my personal prop to do with as I saw fit in order to advance the goals of the Pomegranate Grail.

My last night at the Sanctuary was the fourth day of the fourth month. I was in the fourth day of my fourth menstrual period. Four fours: a propitious omen to launch the new covenant. Numerologically, four means order, system, control, command.

I waited until the last entranced drummer retired from her shamanic quest in the music room (Sibyl was visiting her own death, guided by her astral vulture ally, Cronos) and until the questers in the sweat lodge shuffled off to the dream incubation chamber (Burgundy was hoping to receive a "medicine vision" that would relieve some of the paralyzing panic that had gripped her during her mother's battle with pancreatic cancer).

Shortly after 2:30 a.m., I tucked the Pomegranate Grail under my red silk-clad arm and left the menstrual hut via the outdoor stairs. With a flashlight I made my way to the place in the nearby woods where I'd stashed plastic garbage bags containing two leather tote bags full of essentials. I jammed my red silk robe and gown inside one of the plastic bags and stuffed it under a holly bush, then changed into black pants, black blouse, and black leather jacket.

It was here where my master plan almost got derailed. With a twinge of fear, my heart yearned and stretched in the direction of the burned-out redwood tree, a couple hundred yards away, which had hosted my ritual escape to Melted Popsicle Land and the Televisionarium for more than ten years. How long would it be before I could return to it? Would I be able to open the doors to the Televisionarium with the same ease from a new location in Marin County? Most pressingly, what would happen to my life with Rumbler? I had no doubt that we would continue to meet regularly in dreams; I was sure I would feel his comforting and arousing but elusive presence from time to time during my daily rhythms; but I felt less sanguine about the rendezvous we invoked with the aid of my ritual popsicle sticks.

As if in answer to an unformulated prayer, Rumbler surged into me right then. He didn't "speak." I got no specific message from him. But I felt enormously comforted. It was like getting a hug on the inside; like my heart filling up with "I'll Fly Away," a favorite old gospel song from childhood. Automatically, without willing it, I relaxed. My natural confidence returned. I felt united with my decision. Leaving the woods, I headed to the parking area at the other end of the compound.

I probably could have fired up the Honda without waking anyone. But just to be safe, I put it in neutral and rolled it silently maybe a hundred yards down our long driveway-road. Only when I was far out of earshot of even the guest cottages at the Sanctuary did I turn the ignition.

Forty minutes later I was enjoying coffee, scrambled eggs, and tapioca pudding at the Golden West in Santa Cruz--the same all-night restaurant where my biological mom and dad used to love to hang out. I wondered where they were at that exact moment. Magda was probably asleep in her little shack in Live Oak, a few miles from here. As for Jerome, nobody had heard from him for a few years, but I liked to think that wherever he was on the physical plane, his astral self was engaged in some righteous work with Joan of Arc or Anne Hutchinson or Jesus.

At 6:30 a.m. I left, drove downtown, and parked the car on Cedar Street. Then I hoofed it to the Greyhound bus station, where I caught a bus to San Francisco. I slept on the way, thank Goddess. My dreams were invigorating. In one I was planting lightning bolts in black loamy dirt near my redwood husk temple. In another I was inside a silver bathtub balanced on the crest of a tidal wave that was also a fountain.

The bus arrived in the big city around 9:30. Two hours later I was in a room at the Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill, showing Mr. Anthony Barso the relic he'd only seen photos of up till now. Elsa, my friend from Caffi Pergolesi, was also there to offer moral support. The tentative deal we'd arranged in the previous weeks was that Barso would pay me seven thousand five hundred dollars for the bowl: one thousand five hundred dollars up front as a deposit, and the remainder within three weeks, after he had a chance to run tests on it to confirm its age and authenticity.

Barso was not a demonstrative person, but I could tell he was pleased when he first touched my precious. On the other hand, he either didn't care that the bowl was the Grail, or pretended that he didn't. The age, the quality of the silver, and the unusual artwork seemed to be his main concerns. He indicated in a detached tone that he had seen this same group of symbols only once, and that was on an eighteen-hundred-year-old chalice.

By the time room service brought up our sandwiches, Barso was counting out seventy-five twenty-dollar bills.

The transaction was shady by necessity. We had a written document, but I knew there was no way I could enforce it if he really wanted to flimflam me. One favorable sign was the assurances I'd gotten from Elsa, who had known Barso for years and sincerely believed he wouldn't cheat me. Elsa was half in love with me; I could sense the same awed protectiveness coming from her as I'd felt so often from my mothers.

By 3 P.M. I was on a northbound bus for Marin County. As I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, I pulled one of my new twenty-dollar bills out of the wad and rubbed it on my forehead in a silly act of sympathetic magic.

Somehow I had managed, until that moment, to ward off all thoughts of the grief I might be causing my mothers. I'd been aflame with visions of the scoured new face that awaited me. My imagination had also been toying with fantasies of what I would do if the chiefs of the Pomegranate Grail renounced and banished me. I couldn't believe they'd resort to that, but if they did, I was prepared to launch my own damn mystery school. It would be anchored in the old teachings but fueled by the epiphanies that awaited me.

Unexpectedly, though, as massive Mt. Tamalpais loomed to my left and sparkling Richardson Bay to my right, Vimala's devastation was pouring into me without any censorship whatsoever. I was not projecting or imagining what she felt. Her actual emotional state was being reconfigured in me. I'd had this experience before, but never at such a great distance (when had we ever been separated so thoroughly?), and never saturated with such anguish. I didn't know the thoughts that went with it. Had she already discovered that the Grail was missing? Surely this much pain couldn't have been stirred simply by my as-yet short-term absence. She couldn't possibly know yet that this was the beginning of a time of travail for her. Could she?

My master plan was vague on this point. Would I let my mothers know with a brief phone message that I was all right, even as I continued to hide my whereabouts from them? Or should I make a complete break, maintain utter silence, and require them to wander in limbo, terrified of what had become of me? The former would increase my risk of being found and would make it more difficult to carry out my grand experiment free of their vibes. The latter would be cruel but might be necessary if I hoped to sustain the resolve I'd need to transform myself.

By 5:30 I was checking into the slightly seedy but cheap and serviceable Villa Inn, about three-fourths of a mile from downtown San Rafael. My room had a kitchenette, and there was a coin-operated laundry room on the premises.

I loved the name of the motel. If you shoved together the two words in "Villa Inn," you got "Villain(n)"--the perfect hiding place for a renegade avatar.

No one in the world had any idea where I was, not even Elsa. I'd told her I was bound for Santa Rosa.

What I was looking for in a plastic surgeon was similar to what I liked in a gynecologist: a frank, earthy, voluble woman. The Yellow Pages were full of female doctors, and I began calling them on my first morning in my new digs. Dr. Lilith Elfland quickly emerged as the clear favorite. Her receptionist said they'd had a cancellation, and I could come in that very afternoon. Besides that, I liked her name. The ancient Hebraic heroine Lilith, much revered in the traditions of the Pomegranate Grail, was Adam's first wife, and a far feistier companion than Eve, the naive babe who replaced her.

A nurse led me into an examination room and wrote on a clipboard as I answered questions about my medical history and reason for my visit. Wanting to keep things simple, I didn't mention the heart surgery I'd had as a baby. I had my fake Oklahoma birth certificate in my bag, but she didn't ask for it.

Five minutes after she left, Dr. Elfland entered.

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, push back your hair," she greeted me, throwing what I took to be a bemused glance at the spot where my bangs covered up my birthmark.

I was taken aback at her jocularity, and overcompensated by being much too quick to pin back my forehead hair with bobby pins.

"I don't think I've come across that name in thirty-eight years," she said, leaning against the edge of the metal-framed bed to face me. "Since I was six years old sitting on my mama's lap."

She was shorter than me, about five feet, six inches, and thin for a woman her age. Her black frizzy hair bordered on being an afro, and she wore no make-up that I could see--both unusual touches. I liked her immediately. My off-the-cuff telepathic scan registered her as smart and free-thinking yet kind.

"You know, I can't remember how that story ended," she continued, pushing beyond the boundaries of light introductory banter. "Her step-mother banished her from the tower, right? And sent her into the wasteland? Then what? The usual fairy tale BS about the handsome young prince saving her?"

"No, actually. More like the other way around. Rapunzel and the prince found each other by accident in the wasteland. Her tears fell on his eyes and cured the blindness he'd suffered when he jumped out of the tower escaping from the witch."

"Well, that's good to hear. A happy feminist ending."

"Yeah, except for the fact that the prince had made Rapunzel pregnant right before they got separated. Twins, it turned out. A boy and a girl. She had to give birth by herself out in the hinterlands, then raise them by herself on roots and berries."

"Booooo."

"Well, but there's this. Once she and the prince made it back to the home of his dad the king, I imagine she had all the childcare help she needed."

"Hooray."

Dr. Elfland moved close to me and examined my blotch. I liked the way she smelled. It was a natural, non-perfumy scent. Sweet earth.

"'Dysplastic nevus' is the name we experts call this phenomenon," she said. "What do you call it?"

"Splotch. Blotchy splotchy smirch."

"It's smooth and flat. That's good. Not likely melanoma material. Have you noticed any changes in it over the years?"

"No. I mean except that it's grown bigger with the rest of me. I think it takes up the same fraction of my forehead now as it did when I was young."

"So what took you so long? Must have been a difficult cross to bear."

I was shocked and pleased at her forthrightness. Should I respond candidly?

"Never had the money before now," I stammered. "My aunt and grandma finally decided to take up a family collection for me."

"Well, here's my plan, Rapunzel. A four-step process. Possibly five, but I think we can do it in four. First time we get together we excise half the birthmark. Local anesthesia. You'll be in and out of here in a couple hours. A week later we take the stitches out. Depending on how fast you heal, you come back in four to six weeks and we excise what's left of the mole. Same routine. Stitches out in a week. Third step is to re-excise the scar left from the first two surgeries. About six weeks later we use a machine to sand down any scar that's left."

"It's all outpatient?"

"Yup."

"And what does it look like when we're finished?"

"You've got a faint horizontal scar that looks more and more like a worry line as the months go by."

"How painful is it?"

"Not too. I'll give you a painkiller afterwards, but you may not even need more than good old Advil."

"When do we start?"

"Let's go check with the receptionist to see what's available. She'll go over the costs as well."

As we walked together up to the front desk, she had another surprise for me.

"Now how about this other name of yours? Blavatsky. Is that like Madame Blavatsky, as in the author of Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine? Blavatsky as in one of the most notorious mystics of the nineteenth century?"

I couldn't believe she'd heard of the woman who, according to the somewhat suspect tales of my flaky biological father, was my ancestor. A plastic surgeon who was on speaking terms with theosophical literature? Though she'd used the wrong term. Blavatsky was an occultist and magician more than a mystic. She was too strong-willed to be a dissolve-the-ego mystic.

"Madame Helena Blavatsky was my great-great-great grandmother," I asserted with more certainty than I felt. In fact, my research into the life of my supposed foremother cast doubt on Jerome's claims. Blavatsky told some people she was unable to bear children, having suffered damage to her womb in a fall from a horse while bareback riding in the circus.

On the other hand, there's also the story that she had a child with the Hungarian opera singer and member of the radical Carbonari sect Agardi Metrovitch, whom she saved from assassins in a back street in Cairo--or maybe it was Constantinople. Her accounts varied.

I heartily wished it were true, that we were linked by blood. She was an improbably accomplished, colorful, and well-traveled woman. The erudite (if sometimes wacky) tomes she wrote synthesized Qabalah, Vedanta, and Mahayana Buddhism and were among the most influential occult books ever written. More than a few scholars of the Western Hermetic tradition view her as the mother of the occult explosion that began at the end of the nineteenth century.

At different times in her life, she had as spiritual mentors Swami Dayananda, Jamal ad-Din, and Thakar Singh--the leading reformers of Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism, respectively. She survived a shipwreck off the Greek coast; dallied with secret agents in Central Asia; studied with voodoo priests in New Orleans; hung out with bandits in Mexico; toured Serbia as a concert pianist; worked as an itinerant spirit medium in her native Russia; set up shop as an importer of ostrich feathers in Paris; established the Theosophical Society in India; and traveled in Tibet at a time when it was virtually impossible for anyone, let alone a white woman, to penetrate that inaccessible place.

And besides all that, she had a wicked sense of humor. No less a judge of poetic justice than William Butler Yeats reported approvingly of her pranksmanship. Like the time she snookered a gullible disciple with a story of how the Earth is actually shaped like a dumbbell, having a twin orb stuck on to it at the North Pole.

She was also famous for her supernatural powers. Legends abound of her precipitating showers of roses out of thin air, clairvoyantly finding lost objects, and causing lamp flames to flare up simply by pointing at them. Yeats reported an eerie encounter with her cuckoo clock while alone in her house. Though it wasn't ticking and had no weights, its little bird suddenly emerged and whooped.

"Your feminist pedigree is certainly impeccable, then, isn't it?" Dr. Elfland said as we waited for the receptionist to get off the phone. "Rapunzel, the only heroine in the history of fairy tales to actually save a handsome prince. And Blavatsky, one of the most powerful, charismatic, and intellectually formidable women of the nineteenth century."

"Also the most madcap woman, maybe, who ever lived. Did you hear about the time she supposedly made little chunks of ice magically materialize inside the suit of a pedantic sycophant who was boring her to tears?"

"I'd like to have that ability."

The receptionist set me up with an appointment the following Monday morning at 9. Each surgery would run four hundred dollars, the dermabrasion one hundred fifty dollars.

I felt so excited, so brimming with energy, that I walked half the way back to my motel. En route, I decided to make a brief call to Vimala. Why not? She couldn't stop me now. I was master of my destiny. Compassion was a luxury I could afford.

I bought a blue popsicle at a convenience store and got some change, then picked out a pay phone at a gas station.

"Hello?" Her voice sounded frail.

"Vimala, it's me. I'm fine. Don't worry. I just need some time away." My voice was shaking.

"We need to work on this together, dear. Where are you?"

"I promise to take extra special care of myself. You know me. Ms. Responsible. I couldn't do something foolish if I tried."

"You're hurting me."

"I'm sorry, mom. I love you. I will be back, I promise you."

"When?"

"Not sure yet. I'll let you know next time I call. Bye."

That didn't feel good. I could already feel my resolve to go through with my plan eroding just a little. "Better not call again until after the first time under the knife," I thought.

For the next few days, I kept a low profile. Didn't want to make myself too familiar a face around town. Mostly bought to-go food and raw vegetables and ate in my hotel room. Hung out at a used book store called Mandrake's. There I ordered a tome I'd long wanted to dive into, Carl Jung's Psychology and Alchemy, and found an unexpected bonus by another Jungian--Marie-Louise von Franz's Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology. On the front of the latter book was a crowned serpent swallowing its own tail.

On Monday, the day of the first surgery, I awoke at dawn awash in a joyously familiar scent: sage, pungent earth, moldering leaves, and burnt bark. As I rose out of the abyss of sleep, I realized that the redolence was wafting through my imagination but had no counterpart in the hotel room around me. Where was it coming from? Tracing back its origins, I remembered that I had just been dreaming of the hollowed-out redwood tree that was my meditation chamber back home. I had brought my seven mothers there to show them my other life apart from them. As they reluctantly sucked from the blue popsicles I had commanded them to eat, they were bewildered and distraught. I was triumphant and angry.

"You have never given me back myself," I told them. "I have had to take it from you. It has been hard and I am so angry at you it will take many years before I can forgive you completely. But now that I know how to become the queen I want myself to be, I can also be the queen you want me to be. And so I can freely say to you that I am your avatar. I am the reincarnation of Mary Magdalen, returned at the darkest hour to restore the long-lost balance of male and female so that apocalypse may be averted."

A few hours later I was lying on a table in Dr. Elfland's office, being prepped by her and the nurse.

"Now I'm finally going to bleed because I decided I wanted to bleed," I jokingly thought to myself as she injected the local anesthetic. "This is my real first menstrual period. My self-abduction. From a position of strength, and under my own power."

Dr. Elfland held my hand for a while. It was so sweet I felt like crying. But I held back.

"You have no idea how new this is going to make you feel," she said. "It'll be like getting to reincarnate without having to endure the inconvenience of dying."

I swooned a little. My heart was doing something funny. Almost as if skipping beats. Then it passed.

"You OK?" Dr. Elfland said sympathetically, perhaps sensing my discomfiture.

"Is it possible for the anesthetic to circulate elsewhere in my body?"

"No. Uh-uh. Why? Is there something going on someplace besides your head?"

"No. I'm fine."

"Next comes an injection of saline solution to expand the tissues," she said. By this time my forehead was pretty numb.

I flashed on the dream I'd had earlier that morning. For the first time I remembered that I'd stepped out of the sanctuary of redwood husk, leaving my mothers inside sucking on their blue popsicles. Some distance into the woods, I spied something I hadn't noticed before: a shrine. A large television in a black cabinet served as the foundation for a tiered wedding cake surmounted by a small, decorated Christmas tree. Bride and groom skeletons hugged the tree from opposite sides, their hands clasping. As I drew closer, I could see the image of a talking head on the TV: a sixty-ish woman who was a dead ringer for my great-great-great grandma Helena Blavatsky.

"Always pretend you mean the opposite of what you're saying as well as what you're saying," she squawked. "That's how you kill the apocalypse. Brag about what you can't do and don't have. Exaggerate your faults until they become virtues. Heal yourself by giving yourself more of the same germs that made you sick."

Her voice was simultaneously so sincere and so loony that I burst into guffaws.

"Ready to make history?" Dr. Elfland said brightly, interrupting my dream recall. "Or would you prefer to make herstory?"

"Herstory, please," I replied.

As she cut into my skin, I felt pressure but no pain. My heart began to do that odd skipping again, longer than the last time. Then it stopped, and in its place came a warm fountain of soft electricity. Was it psychosomatic? Suddenly I was flooded with jubilant feelings of love. It was as if a dam had been punctured. I felt possessed by the urge to tell Dr. Elfland how beautiful she was, what an exquisite creature that Goddess had crafted in making her. And the nurse, too, same thing, and the receptionist at the front desk. And all my mothers and friends at the Sanctuary, and the bus driver who'd driven me here, and the hotel clerk, and Anthony Barso and Elsa, and the woman who sold me the von Franz book, and everyone I'd ever met.

It was not a longing to be loved, but a lust to nurture and praise and give love. It was unconditional and generic, a raging inchoate gush that made no discriminations about whom or what it wanted to celebrate.

"You look so happy," Dr. Elfland remarked as she began to sew the two sides of the hole together.

I made a cooing moan.

"No need to explain," she said. "I completely understand."

The worry I'd had about whether my heart was malfunctioning had passed. I fantasized that the palpitations were nothing more than my heart in the process of molting. What a concept. My heart was molting.

And it wasn't finished yet. Wave after wave of bliss welled up from my central pump. It was such a physical sensation. But because of its strong emotional content I had to believe it was originating in the invisible realm.

I wanted to call up everyone I knew and tell them how much I loved them. I wanted to sit down with them and listen as they told their life stories, give them advice about how to do what they came to Earth to do, kiss them all over.

"Phase one complete," Dr. Elfland half-whispered. "Rest here a while. I'll go get a bag of goodies for you to use in taking care of the new hole in your head."

My imagination drifted back to the dream again. It began to generate scenes that I didn't think were in the original but could have been. I found myself in a muddy pit behind the television shrine. Rumbler was there, garbed only in red bicycle shorts.

I made a formal bow to him, and he responded with two slapstick curtsies. I applauded him vigorously and he turned his face away in a bashful effeminate pose but then hocked and spit out the side of his mouth like a macho dude. I winked at him seductively with my left eye, and he cocked his whole face and winked his right eye in the gesture that means sharing a secret.

So began a dialogue of gestures in which I offered and he replied. I thumped my chest with my fist and thrust out my lower jaw, and he flashed the peace sign as he licked his lips nervously. I hid my face with my hands then took them away as if playing peekaboo with a baby, and he sucked his thumb. I jutted my hand out from above my eyebrows as if peering into the distance at him, and he flashed his middle finger as he unleashed a wolf whistle.

After a while I changed the rules. Lowering my head, I ran straight at him and butted him hard in the belly. He fell to the floor and licked the tops of my feet as delicately as a cat sipping from a bowl of milk. I pushed his head through my legs, perched on his back, and spanked him in a drum rhythm. He turned into a bucking bronco, vaulting his back up to try to throw me off. Unsuccessful, he gave up. He leaned back and motioned for me to put my feet on his shoulders and grab his head. I did. With a herculean thrust and a bellowing grunt, he stood up straight. I pushed myself into the standing position too, balancing on top of him. Both of us stretched out our arms. Then he delivered a little speech.

"Any tendency I might have had to worship my own pain more than everyone else's pain," he declaimed, "hereby disappears as I perfect my role as the avatar's beast of burden."

When Dr. Elfland returned, Rumbler and I were trying to do a whirling dervish dance without me toppling off him.

"How you feel?" she asked.

"Surprisingly good."

"There's no rush," she said. "You can relax here as long as you want. But we're done for today. I want to see you back here next Monday to take the stitches out. Here's a prescription for a painkiller. Which you may not need for more than a day or two. Call me if you have any questions or problems. I put a big old band-aid in your to-go bag in case you want to hide my handiwork from public scrutiny."