Forty-five minutes after leaving Dr. Elfland's office, I was back in my hotel room, hoping to follow up on the feelings and fantasies that had overflowed while I lay on the operating table. I drew the curtains closed, took off all my clothes, climbed under the covers, and downed a tablet from my new supply of Vicodin. (Grand experiment: I had never had a psychoactive drug in my life.) There was a six-pack of ginger ale on the nightstand, and my journal was nestled close to me in case I was inspired to write.

I closed my eyes and imagined myself lying in the temple of my burnt-out redwood tree back home. Oops. I flashed on my popsicle sticks. Shouldn't I fetch them? They were stuffed in my leather bag in the closet.

I felt too woozy to retrieve them. Instead, I simply envisioned myself rubbing them together. What the hell. There was no way to recreate exactly the conditions I'd always needed in order to slip into the Televisionarium. Might as well experiment to see what worked here in exile.

I simulated the feeling of the crunchy leaves against my back and pictured myself looking up at the sky through branches. My usual relaxation exercises weren't necessary -- my body was already limp -- so I skipped right to the deep, fast breathing. The transformation was happening with amazing fluidity. I didn't have time to worry about whether or not I could do it. After a few minutes I easily invoked the melting sensation that was the final step over the threshold.

And then I was there on the other side of the veil. The syrupy gossamer web had dropped over me.

But this was different from any version of the Televisionarium I had ever explored back home. There were no unearthly iridescent colors, no talking animals, no volcanoes made of mashed potatoes spewing warm chocolate rain down on fields of golden snow, no diamond ladders that stretched from the bottom of a peppermint tea lake to cloud houses where friendly sphinxes carved medicine dolls out of magic black radishes.

Instead, I was in a junkyard inside a rust-red cave that was as big as a stadium. A rocky roof soared high above me, and everywhere I looked there were scraps and debris, some of it arranged into rough sculptures. In one place, a spiral tangle of decrepit window frames stretched around a central heap of shattered toilets, copper tubing, and televisions. Close to me was a giant claw-footed bathtub filled with baby dolls and human teeth, some of the latter still attached to shreds of decaying gums. Next to it, lodged points-first into a pile of mattresses, was a pair of red plastic scissors almost twice my height. About twenty yards away I could see two old Cadillacs, one pink and one blue, lying on their sides. They had both been bent in half by some powerful mechanical jaws and shoved together to form the approximate shape of a square. A mangled Ferris wheel rose from inside the mass, and from its dilapidated skeleton hung scores of pajamas of all sizes and colors. Some of these were on fire.

The stench of the place was, I felt confounded to note, intoxicating. I mean it was terrible -- a hot sulfurous melange of burning rot -- and yet I couldn't get enough. When I first arrived, my fascination with the uncanny and overwhelming sensation drove me to inhale deeply again and again.

Out of a grotto in the brick-colored stone wall closest to me, there emerged a stage. Except for the fact that it was a rough-hewn structure whose foundation was composed of sections of tree trunks lashed together, it resembled a fashion-model runway. On either side of it were two totem poles, each constructed entirely of televisions crushed and welded together. Some of the screens, maybe fifteen altogether, were fully functional and showed looping scenes of different disasters. One featured the mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion. On others, there was an oil spill aflame on a sickly river, long rows of hospital beds with patients whose bodies were rupturing in torrents of blood, a monstrous tsunami inundating a beach town, and a mob of emaciated rioters invading barricaded condominiums to steal food.

My emotional state was a mix of shock and intrigue. This landscape, in its squalid realism, had none of the glamorous dreaminess I was accustomed to in the Televisionarium. In addition, I was not garbed in the luxurious silks and satins that were my usual vestments there. In fact, I was not clothed at all. For a few moments I contemplated the example of the ancient Celts who used to go into battle stark naked in order to intimidate their enemies. But in a place fraught with so much jagged unfamiliarity, I did not feel comfortable doing that. I made my way over to the Ferris wheel, and, with a broken-off lawnmower handle I picked up on the way, plucked a lime green pajama bottom and orange and purple pajama top to cover myself.

Because I could see a person seated on the runway, I decided to head over there. As I pulled myself up onto it, I found an obese older woman seated on a bed that looked exactly like mine back in the motel room where my physical body lay. The same orange pillows were propped up behind her back, and the same orange and green striped bedspread.

The woman wore a homespun loincloth and a shawl, reminiscent of Mahatma Gandhi. On her head was a medieval-style jester's hat. Fishnet stockings reached to the middle of her corpulent thighs, where they were rolled up. There was a silver ring, some set with gems, on every one of her fingers. On her lap she had a large bowl from which she was eating shrimp, spaghetti, fried eggs, and chocolate.

Nearly surrounding the bed on the floor were colorful papier-mbchi masks, mostly red and yellow, that looked like they'd been made by disturbed children. There were demented bunny rabbits, human-frog hybrids, alien babies, retarded bears, even a kind of waterfall face.

I studied the woman more closely. She had mesmerizing grey-blue eyes, crinkled light brown hair, high cheekbones, and a broad face with a wide nose. I recognized her. It was my great-great-great grandmother Madame Blavatsky.

"Well, I've been meaning to ask you, Queen Trashdevourer, what in Persephone's name are you doing to kill the apocalypse?" she said to me abruptly in a gutteral voice full of phlegm. "How are you annihilating the armageddon that thrives in your and everyone else's heart?"

"My name's not Queen Trashdevourer," I replied.

"No, of course not. It is Rapunzel. Rapunzel Chucklefucker."

"Rapunzel Blavatsky, not Chucklefucker."

"Exactly. Certainly. Blavatsky. Like mine. But that doesn't excuse you from answering the question. What the bloody hell are you doing to kill the apocalypse? That is your job, right? The reason you came to Earth this time around? Just look at this place. It is getting messier and stinkier by the hour."

As she gathered a handful of eggs from her bowl and shoved it into her mouth, she made a sweeping gesture with her arm to call my attention to the scenes around us.

I thought I knew what she was driving at, but I was annoyed that she so presumptuously assumed I would play along with her outrageous use of language. "Kill the apocalypse?" It sounded ironic, mockingly portentous: not exactly a tone I felt comfortable using in regard to a subject as grave as the end of the world.

I heard noises from inside the stony cleft at the end of the runway. A man and woman arguing?

"Sounds too violent for me," I said to Madame Blavatsky. "I can barely bring myself to kill a fly, let alone an apocalypse."

"That's not what I heard," my great-great-great grandmother said. "My sources call you the Slaughterhouse Savior. Annihilator of Armageddon. The Slayer of the Wreckers. She Who Murders Mass Death."

These terms offended me. Worse, they made my throat and gut feel as if they'd been grabbed by a powerful hand. Before I was even conscious of being upset, a choking whine flew from my mouth.

It was embarrassing. Why was I overreacting so acutely? Maybe because everything I'd ever been taught about myself had convinced me that I was a peaceful lover of life, a force for healing and redemption in the world. I had never heard words like "murder" and "slaughter" used to describe me. In my vulnerable state they felt like an assault.

"Incinerator of Illusion," Madame Blavatsky continued in a majestic, mellifluous tone, not acknowledging my breakdown. "Exterminator of Lovelessness. Liquidator of Suffering. Poisoner of Greed."

Now she was verging on caricature. I wondered if she was making fun of me, or testing to see how gullible I was. I was caught between an autonomous visceral distress and a humiliating doubt about whether my distress was unwarranted, having possibly been triggered by a sick joke.

I felt I was on the verge of not liking this woman.

"I'm a creator, not a destroyer," I managed to enunciate as I seethed. "I am spearheading a mystical conspiracy to restore the Goddess to her rightful place as co-ruler of heaven and earth."

This assertion helped restore my bearings, even though it was humiliating (albeit in a milder way) to be quoting the Pomegranate Grail, an institution from whose authority I was supposedly fleeing.

"But I ask you again," she insisted. "How exactly is the lovely art project you just described going to assassinate the apocalypse? How will you and your charming Goddess obliterate the beastly endgame that the bloody patriarchs are hocus-pocusing into existence with their relentless curses?"

Beginning again to believe that her obnoxious query was at least sincere, I forgave her a little. But I resented her insinuation that the role I had been prepared for all these years was a wimpy, ineffectual thing. As allergic as I'd been to certain aspects of my upbringing, I was proud of the education I had received.

In response to Madame Blavatsky's pressure, though, I had to make conscious a doubt that had long plagued me. Vimala and company had never been specific about the strategy by which I would foil the seemingly irrevocable drive of patriarchal culture towards mass annihilation. For a while I'd hoped they were saving juicy revelations about this matter until later. But as the years went by with no clues forthcoming, I increasingly suspected they had no master plan whatsoever. I grew numb and apathetic towards the whole project. It was all too fuzzy and abstract.

The sounds that had been brewing from inside the grotto in the far wall now emerged in the form of two dancers. It looked like Magda and Jerome, my biological mother and father. Neither of them made eye contact as they whirled around me and Madame Blavatsky.

They both wore vulture headdresses, the hooked beak curving down, along with black body suits that had an image of a skeleton on the front and back. Over this foundation, Magda was wearing a red satin merrywidow. Jerome had on a beige leather breechcloth.

Jingle bell bracelets, which they sported around their ankles and wrists, provided a cheery cadence. Their dancing was spritely and more athletic than I thought the real Magda and Jerome would be capable of. Or were these the real Magda and Jerome -- I mean the Dreamtime version of the real ones, their astral bodies? I was used to thinking that my experiences in the Televisionarium were objectively true, not merely products of my imagination. But I wasn't sure I was in the Televisionarium right then.

From time to time, the dancers who resembled Magda and Jerome joined arms, took swigs from metal flasks, then spit triumphantly in each other's faces.

All the while they sang:

If I be dead

or seem to be

It means that death

can't come for me

And so I bleed

Pretend to die

And live again

to kiss the sky

"Magda?" I called out at one point. She ignored me. I had to resist running over to hug her.

"Jerome?" He gave no sign that he'd heard me.

After a few minutes, the two dancers waltzed back into the grotto.

"I am waiting for some sign of intelligent life, Empress Cowdung," Madame Blavatsky said impatiently once they'd disappeared. "How. To. Put. The. Apocalypse. Out. Of. Its. Misery. Will you be getting a job as some Nelson Mandela-meets-Mahatma Gandhi politician who machiavelliates all the nuclear weapon arsenals into oblivion? Will you be building high-tech medical research labs to serve as our frontline of defense against nasty new successors to the Ebola virus and AIDS?"

She paused dramatically and turned to gaze at the TV screen where bodies were exploding in bloody gushes on hospital beds.

"Or perhaps you would prefer to buy and operate a chain of newspapers," she continued, "that awakens your celebrity gossip-drunk readers to the tragic fact that animal and plant species are getting snuffed out at a rapid rate unseen since the mass die-off sixty-five million years ago?"

"Well, I need to do some more meditation on this," I offered finally, trying to recover my composure. About fifty yards away, a massive piece of sculpted junk, a windmill made mostly of skis and crutches, chose this moment to collapse. As I strained my eyes to watch, I saw that some of its fragments fell upon a nearby pile of burning books. I wondered if I should go after the dancers who looked like Magda and Jerome.

"What are you waiting for, Queenie? Meditate the hell out of yourself right now. I've got time."

"It's been my impression," I began, "that the kinds of solutions you're talking about merely attack the symptoms of the blight. I'm all for people taking political action, but I myself have a different job."

"And tell me again what magnificent task that might be?"

"My role is to heal the sickness at the source -- in the collective unconscious of humanity -- through my teachings in the material world and my benevolent hexes on the astral plane."

"Oh, but that doesn't sound very crunchy, does it?" Madame Blavatsky chided. "It may be true in a wishy-washy way, but it is simply not crunchy. Nor very itchy, either. I think you will have to do better than that, Snow White. The patriarchs' apocalypse is a very hardy beast, and very dumb. It will not crumble in the face of just any old wishful thinking. We need something itchy crunchy, my dear. Something squawky twisty and punchy wacky."

"I'll just have to say," I muttered, exasperated at her persistence, "that at the present moment, to the best of my knowledge, I'm not doing anything to kill the apocalypse. Would you care to make a suggestion?"

"Ah! Excellent move! Most bumptious! I love to see receptivity in a sixty-six-million-year-old avatar. Fabulous omen! Lucky day!"

"Sixty-six million years old? You flatter me, grandma."

"Sixty-six million, twenty-two thousand, one hundred fourteen years, three hundred and eleven days old, to be exact."

"Now who's talking in a way that's not very itchy crunchy?"

"You got rid of one experiment gone bad, the dinosaurs. Pretty practical practice for the patriarchy, I'd say."

"You're making me feel crazy."

"Good. Good. It's about time. Those mothers of yours, Goddess bless them, neglected some crucial elements of your education. Madness, for instance. No way you will be able to massacre the genociders of the imagination without a healthy capacity for divine dementia."

I wrinkled my face up in a comically monstrous mask and flailed my elbows like a chicken attempting to fly as I sang "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" in the cracking voice of a wicked old witch. Then I squatted down to do a Russian Cossack dance as I alternately barked like a dog and shouted out, "I am a cabbage head! You are a cabbage head! He, she, and it are cabbage heads!" My sense of humor was returning.

"That is witty but not quite wise," Madame Blavatsky said coolly after my outburst ran its course. "The divine dementia I am talking about may sometimes require the enchanting idiocy you just exhibited, but more often it is inconspicuous to the naked eye."

"Give me a lesson," I dared.

"I already am, most certainly am right now."

"What we're doing now? This is what you call divine dementia?"

"That is correct, my dear. Otherwise known as living in the Drivetime. The realm that is neither the Dreamtime nor the Waketime, but both at the same time. You could say it is the wormhole between the two worlds. The tunnel of love. An excellent location for killing the apocalypse, by the way. Of course it would help if we could get a few million more wizardly people on the planet to master the skill of inhabiting this sly power spot. No question we could electrocute Armageddon in that case."

I immediately liked this notion of the Drivetime. Maybe that's where I was, I thought, and not in my good old Televisionarium. The landscape and garb were different, and so was my state of mind. I wasn't as far gone from my normal waking consciousness. I felt the same delightfully alien dreaminess as usual, but I was more grounded. The analytical lucidity of waking awareness was burning hotter in me, but without any loss of my imagination's fluidic potency. I was indeed in full possession of the powers of both Dreamtime and Waketime.

"So if you know so much about me," I said, "tell me more about myself. Am I, was I, really Mary Magdalen? Who is Rumbler? Is he real, or some split-off part of my own brain? How can my mothers be so smart and so stupid at the same time? If I'm sixty-six million years old, why I can't remember any details about my storied past?"

"For one thing, I am simply not allowed to reel off the story of your life so glibly," Madame Blavatsky said. "Though I can confirm once and for all that you were Mary Magdalen. Or rather you were and are and will always be Mary Magdalen. The past and the present and the future all happen simultaneously, you know.

"But for another thing, I have not actually been here with you for the duration. I arrived almost six hundred eleven thousand years after you. That is when you decided you needed a kind of secretary. Someone to remind you of your appointments -- especially during your experiments with squeezing your vast primordial self into tiny little bodies."

"So I created you out of clay and my magic breath?" I said. "Or I had a romantic liaison with the sun and you were our baby?"

"No, ma'am. I was the very first offspring that popped out of what I currently refer to as the Televisionary Oracle. An ingenious creation of yours. Best thing you ever made. Though of course you did not call it by such a melodious term back then."

"Since that was before there was any such thing as human speech, right? So I must have given it a name that sounded like a waterfall or thunderstorm?"

"Its name in the beginning had a pronunciation similar to the sound of lightning striking a tree."

"So this thing you were born out of, grandma--what you're calling a Televisionary Oracle--what exactly was it, or is it? Does it still exist today?"

"Sorry, my dear forgetful one. Cannot yet describe it in a way you could intellectually fathom. The synapses you took on when you slipped into your all-too-human body do not yet have the spunk to even perceive it. You keep hustling up more meditation skills, though, and that will change. Eventually you will get linked back to your sixty-six-million-year-old brain. I promise. And I will be here for you when you are ready for that phase."

"How about giving a few hints."

"I can tell you that the Televisionary Oracle is a most excellent tool for expediting entry into the Drivetime -- a kind of sacred machine for shamanic questers. In fact, it is how you got here today. Other than that I am afraid I cannot say much more just yet. I apologize. But it is your express directions, you know. Before you shrunk down out of your heavenly haunts and squeezed yourself into that tiny sack of flesh you are now stuck inside, you told me not to distract you with cosmologies and eschatologies. 'Keep me pinned to the details,' you said. 'Make me focus on the practical things.'"

"Such as?"

"Such as what exactly are you doing to kill the apocalypse?"

I had become aware of an emotion coalescing in the space between my heart and throat. It seemed to have been triggered by Madame Blavatsky's image of me "squeezing myself into the tiny sack of flesh I was now stuck inside." This was an unfamiliar psychic state, like what desperate longing would feel like if desperate longing were a good and happy thing. I was aghast yet pleased to tune into it. Was this what it felt like to be in love but denied the one you were in love with?

At the heart of this curiously comforting desolation was the ghost of a memory from when I was very young. It must have been from around the time I first started to talk, maybe about nine to ten months old. I recalled -- for the first time ever -- being in bed with my biological mother Magda.

We were alone together. The only two bodies that had ever existed. One body, really. Swooning and playing, rubbing and cooing, afloat under the gauzy purple blankets. I was tiny and helpless and hungry. She was hot and huge and soft and omnipotent. My mouth was our eternal link, stuffed full of her juicy fat breast. Sweet warm milk trickled forever down into my joy. Silver ocean of her voice drowned me every second. Smoky damp cave of her smell rescued me.

At some random moment in eternity, I paused in my gentle persistent sucking, partly to take a deep breath, but mostly to interrupt the calm joy of the flowing milk so I could incite once again the sharp ecstasy of it bursting afresh into my body. But wait. What was this? As I sighed and shivered, my whole self fluttering in anticipation of the renewed miracle, her giant hand repelled me. "Last time, sweetie," she singsonged sorrowfully but sternly. "No more. No more. Drink from bottle from now on. No more nursing. Time to grow up." And then she guided my confused mouth back to her enormous pulsing nipple. "Last time, baby. No more after this. Last time."

I may not have understood the words, but I felt the vibe with all my being. I realized exactly what was going on. Exile was looming. Separation and banishment. Grief and panic. Helplessness and pandemonium. She was trying to kick me out of the silken oceanic nest. Rip away the umbilical link for the second and final time.

Adrenaline shot through me. Acetylcholine surged through my synapses. At the core of my foggy bliss, the hard bright glimmering of a primal vow germinated. Was this the birth of my ambition? I felt then that everything I was, everything I would ever be, everything I would ever desire, must be devoted to avoiding exile from Her, the Great Goddess. I would learn every trick, discover every secret, penetrate every mystery, in order to preserve the picture of my angel feather love wriggling in her moist edible fire. I would learn to fly free outside of time and tell her a million stories about her beautiful self.

In the aftermath of that vow, my budding little ego, shocked awake by the threat of exile, mastered every nuance of the Great Goddess' needs. Part-telepathic adept, part-perceptive genius, I studied every one of Her smells, every gesture, every tone of voice, until I could predict precisely what feeling was coursing through Her and what response I should launch to make Her feel mirrored and loved and thoroughly delighted.

Whatever skills erupted full-grown in me during that moment of crisis, they proved immediately effective. She retreated from Her threat to cut off my supply of elixir. Not until I was taken from her by the bird-woman, Vimala, some months later, did exile finally claim me. But by then it was too late: My WHO AM I? had been imprinted with WHAT DOES THE GREAT GODDESS NEED?

To remember my atavistic desire was rapturous. Never before had I had a first-hand recollection of my early life with Magda. Vimala had told me a few stingy stories, and between the time I was eight and eleven I had had two brief and awkward meetings with Magda, but this was different. To be so much in love, to be in a trance of delight with the woman in whose body I had first come to Earth, was the recovery of lost treasure. A return to a paradise I'd forgotten I lost.

But as I fermented in this blissful recollection, it gradually gave way to melancholy, and then to anger. Without noticing the exact moment I passed the threshold, I found myself courting hysteria. I became obsessed with how Vimala had never told me I was adopted until I was eight years old. I fumed at how begrudging she had been about telling me the details of my first eighteen months of life. Where had I lived? What were my biological mother and father like? What was the full story of my separation from them?

My rage expanded as I thought of how it had taken Vimala even longer to inform me that I had had a twin brother who died in childbirth, and how unimportant she seemed to regard this crucial fact. I reeled as I thought of how grossly she and my other mothers had always underplayed my heart surgery, as if it were a minor detail that was irrelevant to the project of engineering me into their little avatar puppet.

Worst of all, none of these traumas had ever been formally mourned, let alone acknowledged with alacrity and grace. Many far more minor events in my over-organized life had been accorded the honor of a ritual, but not the loss of my brother, my birth parents, and my natural heart.

"Hello? Is anybody home? Have you been possessed by the spirit of Helen Keller?" Madame Blavatsky was calling through the haze of my reverie.

"I'm too upset to kill the apocalypse," I said finally. "Right now I'm blinded by self-pity. All I can think about is how big a backlog of grief I have in me. And how angry I am at my supposed loved ones for never helping me unload it."

"On the contrary," said Madame Blavatsky. "You are killing the apocalypse even as we speak."

"No I'm not. I'm just a festering pool of narcissism."

"I am telling you, Excellency, that you cannot kill the apocalypse way out there until you kill the apocalypse way in here." She had her hand over her heart. "And you cannot kill the apocalypse way in here until you lovingly explode all the influences -- both the terrible, demonic ones and the nice, loving ones -- that would prevent you from making death your ally."

My heart had begun to rumble and careen again, as it had back in Dr. Elfland's office. Was I on the verge of a heart attack? Had the surgical correction I'd undergone as a baby begun to fail after all these years? Adrenaline pulsed through me, either because there was a real problem or because of my fear that there was a problem. And yet as terrified as I was, a weird hopefulness welled up too. I could not help but entertain the irrational fantasy that my heart was shedding its unnecessary psychic armor; that I was blasting away the repressed emotions that had inhibited me from becoming myself.

"How do I lovingly explode my mothers' influences?" I asked in a whisper. "What does that mean?"

"First, feel the crash-awful feelings they muddled up in you. Drink them all the way down to the bitter bottom. Do not explain to yourself so wearily wise why you should not have the feelings, or complain to yourself about how you wish you would not feel them. Do not be consumed with the urge to blame or a desire for revenge. And do not, for Goddess' sake, bat around grandiose theories about how you came to be possessed by them in the first place. Simply marinate yourself in the stinging, sludge-like pain -- the grief, the anger, the nausea, the helplessness. Allow it all to flood through you in all its hideous splendor. Let the feelings move you to lurch and gnash and writhe and twist for a good long while. At least until you realize there is no longer any need for you to pretend to be in control.

"The second thing you should do, Ms. Avatar Puppet, is feel grateful for having been given the feelings. And it is not enough just to say thank you. Find a way to sincerely feel your bravest, hungriest appreciation. It was the violations your mothers inflicted on you, you know, which are secretly responsible for you being here today, in quest of your true, love-it-to-death calling."

Slowly at first, then with increasing momentum, I was invaded by a perplexing riptide of diametrically opposed emotions. One strain in the weave was the same effusion of unconditional love that I had felt back in Dr. Elfland's office following my surgery. I overflowed with a wild longing to express my love for everyone I had ever met. Starting with my mothers' images, hundreds of faces streamed through my mind's eye, as in the instantaneous life review that supposedly flashes through the imagination of a person who's about to die suddenly.

It was as if the human body has, in addition to the drive for food, sleep, and sex, an instinctive but dormant need to bestow blessings, and I had turned on that primal reflex.

That was but one side of my conflicting mix of feelings. Just as strong as the pangs of fierce generosity was my howling incredulity at how terribly I had been wronged. I was on the verge of sobbing as I contemplated the sickening unfairness of being cast in the role of both treasured savior and hapless puppet. What an oppressive conundrum! I hated all those responsible for conjuring it--my mothers, mostly, but also everyone in the history of the world who had forged the tragic matrix that gave my mothers no other choice but to damage me as they did.

Neither of the two contrary uproars was more true or intense than the other. They coexisted in perfect balance, comprising a bounteous unity. I was a beatific saint and a growling monster. Crucified. Caught once again in the clutch of sublime torture.

Only the inbetween is real.

I did not wail. Nor did I cry or moan. Instead, I relaxed and giggled. I stretched my arms and legs out as far as they would go and I tuned into the curious inwardly spiral motion of the hot flashes in my belly. And then I gave in to a surge of shocking gratitude.

Thank you, I reverberated as I thought of my mothers' crimes against me. Thank you for forcing me to menstruate against my will, and for your confused and overwrought interpretations of the prophecies about me, because in this way you motivated me to discover the beautiful strategy of self-abduction. Thank you for refusing to help me erase my birthmark, because that forced me to seek the adventures and revelations I am enjoying now. Thank you for keeping so many important secrets from me, because that will spur me to be ruthlessly honest. And thank you for inspiring me to hate you, because it's through that hatred that I can understand in the most visceral way how everyone on the planet cultures a little apocalypse inside himself.

Madame Blavatsky had lifted her giant bottom off the throne and was now waddling down the runway towards the grotto.

"Follow me," she called out. "Not to Christ's Last Supper. But to Magdalen's First Supper."

I was hesitant to leave my ruminations -- they were so sensually pleasurable -- but I trod after her. Once through the mouth of the cave, we crouched down and skulked through a claustrophobic hallway. In a moment we arrived at a door that looked familiar, though I could not at first place it in my memory.

Once inside, I felt an even stronger rush of recognition, though my rational mind said I couldn't possibly have been here before. Madame Blavatsky had brought me into a run-down, matchbox-sized suburban apartment. The vomit-green shag carpet was ragged and filthy. The furniture was an ugly mix of dilapidated wood and scratched-up plastic. On the plasterboard walls were hung amateurish acrylic paintings of scenes from fairy tales, including "The Devil with Three Golden Hairs," "The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About the Shivers," and "Rapunzel."

A playpen with a few broken toys was crammed into the tiny living room next to an old-fashioned television that was showing an animated cutaway view of the female reproductive system. A vacuum cleaner stood in the hallway to the bedroom. On the floor next to it was the bag of dust and dirt from inside the machine. There was a rip in it, allowing its contents to spill out.

"Welcome home, Rapunzel Blavatsky," Madame Blavatsky breathed.

What was she talking about?

"This is the spot you first came into the world this time around," she said. "Do you not remember? It is Magda's apartment. Though Jerome stayed here now and then, too."

A glimmer of memory told me she probably spoke the truth. This was the place on Wilkes Circle in Santa Cruz where I had lived until Vimala came and took me away. A welter of odors bloomed, as if my sense of smell had just turned on. The mildew on the wall was the strongest. From the tracks of brown streaks, I surmised that rain had leaked through the roof and watered the green patch on the yellowish plasterboard. I could also smell the lacquered blonde wood that comprised the broken-legged coffee table, wilted chrysanthemums in a Mason jar on top of the TV, and a grocery bag full of empty pickle jars next to the entrance to the kitchen. My grown-up mind judged these aromas as unpleasant, but some more primal sense swelled with sweet nostalgia.

"See that thing over there in the corner?" Madame Blavatsky said. "It looks like a television? It is in fact a Televisionary Oracle, heavily disguised of course. It is the generative power behind this Drivetime experience you are enjoying."

"You mean it's a symbol of the generative power?" I asked, confused.

"No, no. It is the actual source of your visit here with me. Although as I said, you would never be able to perceive it in its raw state -- it would be invisible -- so it has disguised itself as a television. Come with me now."

I followed Madame Blavatsky down the hall to the apartment's only bedroom. If this place was what she said it was, I was now in the room where I was born, where my brother died. Could it be? It was so small. There was only one piece of furniture here, a beautiful round wooden table, which stood in dramatic contrast to everything else.

The Grail cup I had sold -- the beloved artifact of my adoptive mothers' ancient mystery school -- was set in the middle. It was filled to the brim with a thick red liquid. Around it were platters filled with hot sliced turkey, cranberry sauce, creamed potatoes, corn chowder, artichokes, black olives, and strawberry cheesecake.

From under the table, Madame Blavatsky pulled a thin rubber hose and a red and black Supersoaker squirtgun. The latter was the size of a small rocket-launcher. With the tube she siphoned liquid from the Grail into the Supersoaker. When she was finished, she beckoned me to approach her. She brought the muzzle of her weapon up close to my mouth. I opened wide and she shot a dose inside. I couldn't place the taste. It was salty and smoky and slightly bitter. It didn't make me gag, but I was glad to have no more than one swallow. A pungent, astringent tang remained in my mouth for some time afterward.

"Take and drink of this," Madame Blavatsky intoned after she squirted, "for this is the Chalice of Your Blood, a living symbol of the new and eternal covenant. It is the mystery of faith, which will be shed for many, that they may attain tantric jubilation and kill the apocalypse."

She handed me the gun and gestured for me to feed her.

"But first, repeat what I said," she commanded, "only say 'Chalice of My Blood.'"

I did this. When I finished, she spoke.

"Here is how I plan to kill the apocalypse, Queen Grail-Stealer. I will help you build a global network of moon lodges. Sanctuaries to compassionately murder the death culture. Havens where it is always once upon a time, far from the nine-to-five crimes against the rhythms of sleep and love. Death to Pizza Hut! Long live Menstrual Hut! From Kuala Lumpur to Seattle to Tierra del Fuego, may all women everywhere get their four days of resurrection every month!

"And all men, too, for that matter. They need it even more than we do, do they not? Otherwise they just go on and on and on and on -- their poor bodies do not have a built-in mechanism to slow them down like ours do -- and they never stop to peer into the heart of their own darkness. Which is why they find evil everywhere else except in themselves, and create it everywhere else, and fight it everywhere else.

"Menstrual huts will kill the apocalypse. Four days of darkish down time a month will allow us all the regular breakdowns we sorely need. No more pushing and pushing until our shadows are forced to bite us in the butt.

"Like you always say, Rapunzel, everyone who believes in the devil is the devil."

Actually, I had never said that in my life.

"There is another way I am slaughtering the end of the world," she continued. "I am going to help you work on producing and promoting a global festival that will take the place of the apocalypse. 'Twenty-Two Minutes of World Orgasm' is what we will call it. I want it to martial some of the same climactic juice as the phallocratic grande morte, but sublimate it into a more petite, if still monumental, morte. Sort of an erotic version of New Year's Eve plus the Superbowl plus the original Woodstock plus the end of a big war. At the appointed minute of the appointed day -- have not decided exactly when yet -- I will help you try to get every single adult on the planet to maximize their bliss simultaneously."

She gestured for me to dose her again with the Supersoaker.

"One more technique for murdering armageddon I would like to testify about," she said. "It involves stopping the genocide of the imagination in my own imagination. Like for instance, right now I am imagining sex with candy bars ...and homeless oil company presidents digging for food scraps in garbage cans ...and a psychedelic mushroom cloud sprouting from the penis of a nine-hundred-foot-tall Christ ...and the Dalai Lama channeling Salvador Dali in testimony against Salvadoran death squads ...and Dionysus and Eleanor Roosevelt dramatizing the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice at a sacred shopping mall in Tadzhikistan ...and a new kind of aphrodisiac that stimulates compassion as much as lust."

Madame Blavatsky took the Supersoaker from me and shot it crazily at the walls. "Look out all you phallocratic ass-souls. Rapunzel and I will soon be spraying your decaying creation with bolts of the liberated imagination."

Then she placed the Supersoaker gently in my arms and addressed me. "Have I inspired you at all? Would you like to add anything to your previous testimony? What exactly are you doing -- what would you like to do -- to kill the apocalypse?"

"I think for now, if it's OK with you," I say, "I'm just going to start slow. I promise that to kill the apocalypse I will pick blackberries in the rain and dance around bonfires while singing freedom songs with mysterious friends. Amen."