Hunkered down in our home-made shrine beneath the Goodwill trailer, Jumbler and I successfully downed our cruel feast without vomiting: the bitter tentacles of the date palm, the salty sweet, beef jerkyish "candy" called Pulparindo, the sour and worm-like shreds of "tender cactus," and the mummified corpses of the ancient (and perhaps moldy) Andean tubers.

"And now comes the second ordeal that all must endure if they seek initiation into The Eater of Cruelty," Jumbler said. "This blasphemous yet sublime outrage will require us to assume the posture of beasts."

I scrambled to obey. The underside of the trailer was only about three feet above the asphalt. We had to hunch over while in the sitting position but had more room to navigate when we got on all fours. Jumbler and I were now facing each other, almost butting heads.

"Raise your fully-opened left hand to a location above and behind your buttocks. Concentrate all your lust for justice in that hand and prepare to smash it with great force against the target. But wait. Not yet.

"First, meditate for a moment on the terrible responsibility you are asking to take on. In seeking admission to The Eater of Cruelty, you are promising to be cruel to the forces of evil and ignorance without yourself ever actually feeling cruel. Bemused compassion must be your predominant emotional state as you dispense righteousness. Will you pledge, therefore, to fight to the death any hidden attraction you might have to the seductive lure of hatred?"

"Me! Me!" I called out. "I pledge to hate hatred."

"That is why you are being asked to spank yourself now," Jumbler continued. "Think of it as a pre-emptive strike, an immunization. By punishing yourself in advance for any hatred you may be tempted to entertain, you will steer yourself away from committing that original sin in the first place.

"Now let your left hand charge up with the beautiful cruelty of uproariously unconditional love. And spank yourself -- for as long as it takes!"

Ow! The first few slaps hurt. But as I continued the relentless pounding, alternating cheeks, a slight numbness set in. A minute after I'd started, my body even found a perverse pleasure in the cognitive dissonance of being touched so forcefully without experiencing the pain that was implied by the fierce impact. But soon the accumulated shock of the battering began to unsettle me. The burning ache in my butt's nerve endings expanded into a kind of spiritual distress.

I found myself thinking of an experiment I'd heard about once. The test subjects were rapists. They were locked in a room and forced to watch film footage containing violence towards women. Every time a graphic scene came on, the subjects received an agonizing electrical jolt. In this way, they were deprogrammed of the power and gusto they'd unconsciously learned to associate with rape.

Would a similar approach work with me? I tried to recall times in my life when I had felt raging bolts of hatred. They were pretty few in number, mostly confined to the moments I had directly confronted Vimala with a demand to expunge my birthmark and she had refused. But I had to confess I was capable of another brand of hatred--sustained and calculating. The prize example was the way I had punished my mothers by refusing to menstruate. That was a five-year project in well-crafted resentment.

I conjured up those memories in vivid detail as I spanked myself with redoubled fury. Other scenes drew my attention, too, like the day of my coronation at age six, when I was possessed with the lucid realization that I was my mothers' puppet. In that moment I had first learned the majesty and potency of unrepentant malice.

"Left hand tired?" Jumbler said after a long time in which only slaps were heard over the roar of traffic on nearby Third Street. "Switch to the right."

Truly now it was becoming an ordeal. My leg muscles were shaking from a combination of discomfort and exhaustion. I thought I might collapse, and fought against it. The fact that I had to exert my will to prolong the torment made the torment even worse. I was both victim and torturer.

Now a new inner voice rose up, a dissident. It complained why should I try to extinguish my hatred? Hadn't it served me well? Wasn't it the dynamic motivating force that led me to discover the secret of self-abduction? I wouldn't even be having this mysterious encounter with Jumbler if I hadn't harnessed the fuel of my anger.

Unless. Could it be true what he said? Was it possible to invoke all my fighting powers without actually feeling hatred? Could I take aggressive action against injustice and ignorance if I was filled to the brim with love sweet love? That seemed insanely naive.

"Remember, there is a difference between grateful anger and dehumanizing hatred," Jumbler shouted above the din of our spanks. Was he reading my mind?

"What ... do ... you ... mean?" I yelled back in rhythm to my smacks.

"Grateful anger is good darkness. Dehumanizing hatred is bad darkness."

"More clues, please."

"Grateful anger flows when you have engaged and studied your shadow. Dehumanizing hatred flows when you have ignored and denied your shadow. One is fertile, the other hysterical."

A mathematical formula: I liked that. I assumed he meant the shadow that Carl Jung described. The unripe and unillumined corners of the soul.

"Grateful anger is when you feel thankful for the irritating people and sickening situations that have spurred you to clarity and righteous action. Dehumanizing hatred is when you are so in love with your terrible emotion that you forget what needs to be changed and turn yourself into your enemy."

Now I was really confused. Was my rebellion against my mothers good darkness or bad darkness?

"What about if the grateful anger and dehumanizing hatred are all mixed together?" I said. "What do you do then?"

Jumbler suddenly stopped spanking himself. Still on all fours, he crawled behind me and halted my participation in the ritual too. Instead of letting my hand down, though, he held it up in front of me.

"Winner and new champion of the spanking initiation, Rapunzel Blavatsky," he announced like a boxing referee. "Congratulations and blessings! No one has ever before asked the bedrock life-and-death question so early in the ordeal."

He let my hand down and bent over to whisper in my ear.

"The answer to the question, 'What do you do when the good darkness and bad darkness are all mixed together?' is this: You go out and launch a full-scale attack on that tricky old bastard God himself. Come with me. You are ready for initiatory ordeal number three."

Jumbler pulled me out from underneath the trailer. When I was standing, he seized my hand and took off running. My butt was throbbing, but it felt good to move so fast after being scrunched up. In a couple of short blocks we arrived at a large fenced lot. Inside was an electrical power-generating substation spread over maybe three acres, though it didn't seem to be in use. Among the maze of metal, there wasn't a buzz or a light or a human presence. I followed him as he climbed over the fence and dropped to the ground inside.

Heavy low clouds scudded along overhead and were about to swallow the gibbous moon rising over a highway overpass a few blocks to the east.

"Gather your ammunition," Jumbler commanded, picking up a big rock from the sandy ground.

"Take that, you lovable old asshole!" he screamed as he heaved his missile straight up. It fell to earth about ten yards in front of us.

"Aim for heaven, Rapunzel," he turned to address me. "Make a direct hit and God might be so intimidated, or perhaps impressed is the better word, that he will show you how to disentangle the good darkness from the bad. Then again, he might not. But in any case, it is good to apprise the Supreme Being that we know it is all His fault."

He collected three smaller projectiles and sent them soaring towards the night sky. In its descent, one rock pinged a transformer a short distance from where we were. The other two made audible sounds in the hard dirt as they nose-dived.

"The good thing about this command post," Jumbler confided in me as I scooped up two rocks of my own, "is that if the bombs don't actually crash into God, they will not hurt any innocent bystanders when they plunge back down."

My first effort was unimpressive, a shallow foray. I never lost sight of the rock's flight in the night sky. It plinked down meekly about ten yards away. Jumbler pounced on two fist-sized rocks and pitched them up with a relaxed fury. Again, two clanks heralded their arrival somewhere amidst the mass of metal that stretched before us.

I got a running start for my second launch. With a karate yell, I brought my arm down to the ground and then propelled my payload starwards as hard and straight as I could.

This time there was no chink of metal, no thud of ground. How could that be? I was sure I hadn't arced it so far that it landed out of earshot. My throw was almost perfectly vertical. Indeed, I was afraid it might hit one of us.

"Victory!" Jumbler shouted after another few seconds passed with no audible sign of my rock's descent. "The heavenly stronghold has been breached. Perhaps God himself has been dinged by the amazon's bombardment."

He grabbed both my hands and danced me around in circles.

"Even more important," he exclaimed, "The Eater of Cruelty is now open for business with its first two recruits. Initiation was wildly successful."

"But you didn't make a direct hit on heaven," I protested fondly. "I did. I passed all three ordeals and you only passed two. Why should you get initiated too?"

"Because I was here to bear witness to your merciful assault, and that is just as crucial as the assault itself."

"OK," I allowed, "but only if I get to be the Queen of The Eater of Cruelty and you're vice-president."

"I do not want such a lofty position in the organization," he said. "If it is all right with you, I prefer the title of Head Janitor."

He shepherded me to the opposite end of the defunct power station. In a couple of minutes we were escaping over the fence. He bid me to follow him to a 7-Eleven that was within sight. Only then did I realize that we had left the Jung and Artaud books, as well as my empty Clorox bottle, back at the Goodwill trailer with the rest of the shrine.

"Shall we pick up some supplies at the sacred store over there and begin our first performance?" he asked, pointing at the 7-Eleven.

Suddenly I felt an uncontrollable urge. Too giddy to censor myself, I slinked up behind him and began tickling his sides. He squirmed and laughed at first, then launched a counteroffensive. He lifted me up on his back, locked his skinny arms around my legs, and carried me along with difficulty, breathing hard. I held on to his shoulders. We entered the store that way, to the alarm of the Pakistani clerk.

"No dancing in the store," he called out to us.

"We're not dancing," I said recklessly, "we're praying." I started murmuring the prayer-like thing Madame Blavatsky had had me chant during our Supersoaker eucharist in the Drivetime earlier that afternoon. "Take and drink of this, for this is the Chalice of My 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."

This seemed to appease the clerk. It also caught Jumbler's attention.

"What does this colorful phrase mean -- 'kill the apocalypse'?" he said as he grabbed a box of envelopes, a package of ruled notebook paper, a bag of rubber bands, and two Bic pens. I leaned my face against the left side of his head. His hair smelled delicious, a kind of musky lavender.

"It comes from one of my other great helpers, Madame Helena P. Blavatsky. I told you about her earlier. She likes to ask me, 'What are you doing to kill the apocalypse?' She thinks it's the most important question in the world."

"But it cannot be the most important question in the world, because that title belongs to the one you posed before: 'What do you do when the good darkness and bad darkness are all mixed together?'"

"Maybe they're two different approaches to the same problem?" I said.

He plucked a box of small birthday candles from one shelf and old-fashioned razor blades from another. Soon we were in front of the cracker section. He knelt down and had me dismount from his back. I surprised myself by massaging his shoulders for a few seconds. Were we that familiar already?

He handed me the goods he'd gathered so that he could collect an armful of Cracker Jack boxes. I followed him up to the front, where he tried to pay with a fifty-dollar bill. The clerk frowned and refused to take the money. Jumbler returned the bill to his wallet, which I saw now was well-stocked, and produced two twenties, which were accepted. I noticed the clock. It was already 9:30. Close to my bedtime. I'd been up since 6:30.

In a minute, we were outside the store spreading out our haul.

"So what are you doing to kill the apocalypse, anyway?" Jumbler asked. He was using a razor blade to slice an inconspicuous slit in one side of the top of each of the Cracker Jack boxes.

"Today? Today I am killing the apocalypse by setting aside everything I believe in and forgetting all about myself so I can listen hard to you."

"And what about that head wound of yours? Does that have anything to do with killing the apocalypse?" He nodded in the direction of my forehead.

I instinctively turned towards the plate-glass front of the store, which we were squatting beside. Checking my reflection, I saw that a tiny corner of white gauze was jutting out from beneath my beret. Given all the running and jumping I had done, I wasn't surprised. I tucked the bandage back in.

"It's a long story," I answered. "And as I said, I'd rather hear your story right now. Later I'll tell you all the gory details if you want."

He had taken five fifty-dollar bills out of his wallet and folded them neatly in quarters. Now he was slipping one apiece into the Cracker Jack boxes he'd cut open.

"I will tell you one good strategy I have to kill the apocalypse," he said. "It is called mirroring. Do you know what that is?"

"Hmmm. Giving people images of themselves?"

"It would be better to say giving people true images of themselves."

"Yeah, I suppose most everyone is blasted nonstop with distorted and degrading images of themselves. Guess you couldn't call that mirroring. Funhouse mirroring might be a more accurate term."

"Exactly right. And I would say that is the prime reason why humanity finds itself on the verge of self-annihilation."

"Not enough mirroring, too much funhouse mirroring, is the cause of the apocalypse? How do you figure?"

"In Tibet, there are children who are identified at an early age as tulkus, reincarnated holy men and women. They are taken to monasteries and raised there by Buddhist monks or nuns who are absolutely certain of their divine nature. Day after day, year after year, these special children are told they are wise and compassionate beings who deserve to be showered constantly with devoted outpourings of love. And showered they are. Would you like to make a guess what proportion of these children grow up to be exactly what they are expected to be?"

"I imagine it's very high."

"Ninety-nine percent."

"But is that true mirroring or inflated mirroring?" I couldn't help but wonder what the implications of his argument might be for my own life. Hadn't my upbringing been similar to the tulkus?

Jumbler was on the verge of slipping fifty-dollar bills into eight more Cracker Jack boxes.

"Here is my point, my dear," he replied. "All children are born wise and compassionate beings who deserve to be showered constantly with devoted outpourings of love. Every single one of them would grow up to be a tulku if he were treated like a tulku."

"So true mirroring means never reflecting back a person's shadowy sides? Never criticizing or correcting? That doesn't sound right."

"Of course not. Take you, for instance. I have always loved you, and I will always love you. But if you agreed to allow me to mirror you, I would let you know, with all my most tender compassion, which of your unconscious habits might be preventing your full bloom."

I will always remember the next moment as a landmark because it was the first time in my life I had a visceral understanding of the word swoon. It was like in one of my dreams where I fall off a cliff and halfway through my plunge I figure out I can fly. It also felt as if the whole inside of my body suddenly billowed. In my mind's eye I saw a time-lapse film of the roots of an oak tree drinking in a downpour after a long drought.

When I opened my eyes again, Jumbler was writing on a piece of notebook paper. He didn't seem to mind that I hadn't responded to his mirroring. In a couple of minutes, he handed me the page.

"What do you think?" he asked. "If you like it, help me handwrite a few more copies. Or feel free to edit or expand it. I would like to make thirteen altogether."

The note read as follows:

Dear Beautiful, Intelligent, Kind, Creative Creature:

Though in the past you have often forgotten the truth about yourself, the fact is that you are an amazing gift to the human race. From now on you will never lose sight of that. Beginning today, your life will become an ongoing miracle of inspiration, bringing you a multitude of blessings you didn't even know you wanted. Ready or not, you must now learn to embrace the very success you've always been most afraid of.

With all our love,

Two Anonymous Celebrities

We worked in silence for a while until we had stuffed thirteen envelopes with a love note and a birthday candle. With rubber bands we attached each of these to a Cracker Jack box that was stuffed with a carefully folded fifty-dollar bill. A quick calculation put Jumbler's investment here at six hundred fifty dollars, plus the cost of materials.

As I stuffed the bundles into our plastic bags, he walked over to a skinny tree on the sidewalk and fiddled with the lock of a bike chained there. Returning with it, he said, "Here is our transportation."

It was a bulky one-speed bike with thick, well-worn tires. This was the vehicle of choice for a person with a wallet crammed with high-denomination bills?

"You ride on the handlebars," he said. "I will steer and peddle."

"Where are we headed exactly?" I asked.

"To your place, I hope. I would very much like to set up The Eater of Cruelty command post tonight. On the way there, we can drop off these offerings."

"Head north on Lincoln Street," I said. "It's about three-quarters of a mile from downtown."

I thought of what I'd told Vimala when I called her a few days ago. Don't worry about me, I said. I've always been Ms. Responsible. Couldn't do anything foolish if I tried.

And yet here I was on the night of my surgery, staying up past my bedtime and doing things that if not illegal certainly had the potential to draw the suspicious attention of law enforcement officers. Worse, I was bringing a stranger back to my motel room with me. A magical stranger, true, whose imagination thrilled me. But still.

High on the list of reasons to trust him was the fact that he hadn't leaked a single dribble of gross male carnality. Scoring with babes did not seem to be a shtick he'd studied. Not that I'd had a lot of previous exposure to that phenomenon, but more than enough to recognize its simple universal signs.

The truth seemed to be that I had to worry more about my own cravings. As far as I could tell, his passion for me was a platonic simmer. I, on the other hand, was a recent convert to the cult of swoon.

My imagination flickered with a scene of us doing a swimming dance together in the pool back at my motel.

Wait a minute. Was the pool heated? I didn't know. I'd never been in. If not, a night in mid-April would be unluxuriously chilly. Suspend that fantasy for now.

This dose of reality reminded me of a blunt fact that my conscious mind always had trouble acknowledging: I'd never had an erotic encounter with an actual male before. My extensive sensual play with Rumbler in the Televisionarium had filled me with rich memories of eros, however. Besides that, my sex education had been thorough and uncensored. I'd come of age armed with confidence about the subject.

But did I really want to have sex with Jumbler, as in sexual intercourse? I didn't know. First of all, I wasn't even sure I was attracted to him physically. With its weird blend of elegance and trickiness, his face wasn't aligned with the kinds of male beauty I'd identified as my type. And his body had a delicacy which, though not unattractive, wasn't a quality that had ever pricked my libido before.

Secondly, what I was sure I did want were silky, evanescent sensations like those Rumbler and I aroused in each other in the Televisionarium: the beyond-the-body rapture that came from flying together after leaping off the tops of magic trees or staring into each other's eyes until we disappeared into the taste of grapes and the sound of cellos and the smell of the ocean at dawn and the sight of the moon rising over a green hill in springtime.

As I contemplated these matters, a crushing collapse was dangerously near. For the first time it occurred to me that maybe the feelings I enjoyed with Rumbler were not possible to experience with an actual male.

By now Jumbler and I had traveled a rickety few blocks on his bomb of a bike. It was a miracle we hadn't crashed yet. I sat precariously on the handlebars, my hands grasping cold metal on either side of my butt. Facing out with legs dangling, I had to avoid contact with the front tire. Meanwhile, Jumbler struggled to pedal, largely blinded by my body. Two plastic bags full of stuff were wrapped around his wrists and hanging down heavily. Several times I shouted out a warning when it appeared he hadn't seen an obstacle we were about to crash into.

He took us back to our shrine beneath the Goodwill trailer, where we retrieved the books by Jung and Artaud, as well as my Clorox bottle. Here, too, we left the first of our Cracker Jack boxes and love notes.

"Anonymous gifts are much better than the other kind," Jumbler remarked as we remounted the bike and headed out.

"When the recipient doesn't know who the gift came from, she has no psychological debt to repay," I agreed.

"Even more importantly, the giver cannot use the gift to enhance his social status or inflate his ego. He is helpless to lord his generosity over everyone."

"Yes, I've noticed that people who're skilled at convincing you they're magnanimous are often masters of manipulation, too."

"Do you know what the German word 'Gift' means in English?"

"No."

"Poison."

"The story of my life!" I laughed. Then in a sudden burst of vengeful glee, I shouted out, "Mommies, Mommies, wherever you are tonight, danke for the Gift !"

"I want to hear more about where that comes from," Jumbler noted as he brought our vehicle to a stop.

"I plan on making a full confession in the near future."

"In the meantime, I have distilled my second answer to your question, how to kill the apocalypse."

"Which is?"

"Give anonymous gifts that no one can thank you for."

"I can see how that might be a recipe for a less crass culture, but I'm not sure I understand how it kills the apocalypse."

"Think of how much evil in the world is perpetrated by people who purport to be doing good. Think of all the murderous gifts history has been plagued by."

Jumbler's comment propelled me into a meditation I preferred to avoid. As an example of evil disguised as good, I couldn't help but think of the mangled religion the early fathers of the Christian church had fabricated out of the work Jesus and I had done. But I was shy about mentioning Jesus to Jumbler. I didn't want to get into a discussion about the implications of his apparent claim, earlier, that he himself had been Jesus in a previous incarnation.

"But the murderous gifts would be just as lethal if they were anonymous, wouldn't they?" I said instead.

"No, because the most destructive gifts are always those which are covertly meant to demonstrate the greatness of their givers."

A steady drizzle had begun, which would be unusual for April in Santa Cruz, though I thought maybe it was more common here in Marin. We had arrived on the sidewalk in front of a house. Jumbler skulked up to the porch and deposited a Cracker Jack box and love note in the mailbox, then hightailed it back to me.

"Quick, we must escape before our beneficiary spots us," he stage-whispered. We reassembled ourselves on the bike and barreled away to the next stop, a few doors down, where he performed a similar operation.

For the next half-mile or so, we delivered our boons as the rain fell harder and we got wetter. Jumbler chose the first four mailboxes, but then invited me to choose. This effectively exploded my unlikely hypothesis that maybe we would stop exclusively at homes where Jumbler had friends who were in on an elaborate joke being played on me.

We were almost to my motel and still had four undelivered packages. Our route along Lincoln Street had passed a lot of apartment buildings whose mailboxes weren't accessible. At this point I demanded that Jumbler switch places with me. Guiding the bike for the first time, I detoured down Brookdale Avenue, a short street parallel to Lincoln. It was packed with single-family homes.

As I unloaded the second-to-last package on a large porch, I noticed a face gazing out at me from a window in the front door. I scampered away down the stairs just as the door flung open. Having seen the danger, Jumbler motioned for me to abandon the bike and race away on foot.

As we ran, I heard what sounded like a baseball bat pounding on the wooden floor of the porch. "Next time I'll get my shotgun," a woman's voice yelled after us.

"Another good reason for keeping your gifts anonymous," Jumbler giggled when we'd made it back to Lincoln Street. "Some people hate you for giving them things."

"You just going to leave your bike behind?" I asked.

"An honorable sacrifice," he replied. "The first official loss of The Eater of Cruelty. May there be many such worthy losses in the future, all as easy to bear as that one."

As we pulled into the parking lot of my home, the Villa Inn, Jumbler and I were drenched. I remembered we still had one Cracker Jack box and love note undelivered.

"Uh-oh," I said, taking from Jumbler the bag that contained the last treat. "I hope we won't incur any nasty karma. Isn't it a sin when those with a lot to give don't get around to dispensing all their gifts? I think there are a couple stories in Grimms' Fairy Tales about poor souls like that."

"But I am bestowing this final treasure on you, my dear," he said. "What good is it to shower the whole world with our blessings if we do not grant the same favor to each other?" His teeth were chattering. The rain wasn't cold, but now that it had saturated us, we were.

We climbed the stairs to my room.

"But it's not an anonymous present," I protested. "Now I owe you one. You're probably already plotting how to use my debt against me."

It was a joke, but it reflected a secret truth. I felt that from the moment we'd met at the bookstore he'd done most of the giving and I most of the taking. And then there was that weird exchange on the way to the Goodwill trailer, when I found myself bawling him out for having tried to outgive me in every one of our lifetimes together -- as if I implicitly believed all his stories about those lifetimes. At that moment, I truly felt that we were recapitulating an argument we had carried on for centuries.

"Then you will just have to present me with a gift of equal value as soon as possible," he said.

I put the key in the lock of room number 65, ushered us in, and flipped on the light switch. As always, the smell of this place was unexpected and inscrutable. It was partly stale cigarette smoke not-quite-overwhelmed by pine disinfectant. But there was also an entire musty-fresh kaleidoscope: lemon and mildew, perfume of violets mingling with formaldehyde, potpourris that were old when Joan of Arc lived. It made me think of the funeral of my mom Burgundy's grandmother in Detroit: shriveled-up ninety-eight-year-old crone packed amidst virgin white satin and lusty roses.

"Would you like some dry clothes?" I asked him as I turned up the thermostat. "You're free to select anything from my designer wardrobe in the closet. I'm going to take a bath." Since we were the same height, I was sure my stuff would fit him.

I grabbed my black velvet tights and long black velvet tunic and took them with me into the bathroom for after the bath. As I disappeared, Jumbler was examining the altar I had created on top of the television. Among other things, it included a wishbone, a postcard of a Miro painting, an Amnesty International sticker, pumpkin seeds, a prayer flag, a silver and black Persephone statue, an origami of a hummingbird, walnuts, my ceremonial wand and dagger, and a large rock on which I'd written a prayer in miniature calligraphy.

I felt a surge of pride that Jumbler would see this oasis of holy beauty I had managed to carve out of an otherwise ugly room. That was his specialty, right?

I wanted to come up with a return gift for him as soon as possible. Something from the altar? The prayer rock, perhaps? But as I waited for the bathtub to fill, I got a better idea. In the bathroom, hanging on the wall next to the sink, was an odd little artifact provided by the motel management. About four by twelve inches, it was a piece of material that blended the feel of paper and cloth. "Shoe Shiner" it read in blue print at the top, followed by these claims:

Will also

Clean Your Razor

Remove Cosmetics

Clean Your Eye Glasses

Along the sides it said, "Compliments of the Management" and "Begin Your Day Bright and Shining."

It was a good gift -- ordinary yet weird, versatile and anomalous -- but I wanted to make it even better. I fetched a pen out of the drawer next to the bed and added to the list of what this magic item could do.

Polish Funhouse Mirrors

Wipe Out Poison From Gifts

Prime Spanking Surfaces

Mop Up Cruel Food Which Has Been Regurgitated

As I finished the alterations, I felt a twinge of pain, accompanied by a pinch of responsibility. It was time to attend to my head wound. I took four more Advils from my stash on the sink and assembled the supplies Dr. Elfland had given me.

In my small bathroom, there were two mirrors: a wide one over the sink and a skinny, floor-length one on the opposite wall. Since my arrival in San Rafael four days ago, I'd reserved all my self-observations for the latter. If I stood up straight in front of it, the top of its reflecting surface stopped at my eyebrows. In other words, it cut off the part of my body where the stain was.

Now, though, I felt compassion for the cursed blotch. It was in its death throes, after all. I could afford to be an indulgent caretaker. I stared into the mirror over the sink, removed my beret, and peeled away the bandage. Uhhhhgggg-ly. Swollen, red, stitched, Frankensteinian. I used cotton balls to gingerly apply some medicinal cleanser. It hurt, though not as much as I expected.

Then I got the bright idea to leave it naked and exposed. It would benefit from not being covered up with gauze for a while, I reasoned. Let it air out. Besides that, I had an urge to see how Jumbler would react to it. With all the apparently idealized notions he had of me, maybe he needed a dose of funky reality. I think a cowardly part of me was hoping to scare him off, too. That way I wouldn't have to worry about whether I should act on my erotic curiosity.

My bath was brief and efficient. I didn't want to risk amping up my sensuality any higher than it already was. When I emerged, fully dressed except for socks, I found him sitting at the round table in the kitchenette. He was making a sign on the back of the motel placemat he'd taken off the desk next to the TV. It looked like it would soon read "The Eater of Cruelty Command Center."

His waterlogged white clothes were in a pile in the corner. He had donned my only pair of pajamas, which were black flannel, and my only luxurious piece of clothing, an indigo cashmere robe. Without the frame of his boxy unisex white costume, he looked more feline, almost feminine.

Outside, the rain had become a soft roar. I was glad it had waited for us to finish most of our playtime before kicking in. It joined with the hovering steam from the bath to create an almost homey feeling.

"Here's my equal and opposite gift," I said matter-of-factly as I set the "Shoe Shiner" down in front of him. He looked at it, gazed up at me briefly, then returned his view to the gift.

"This is a masterpiece," he exclaimed with a quiet joviality. "Better yet, a spontaneously conceived masterpiece. Living proof that you are vivaciously attuned to the specific truth of the eternal now. Truly, no one deserves to be Queen of The Eater of Cruelty more than you."

He rose from his chair to face me and pressed his hands together in the gesture of prayer.

"And now," he said softly, "I request permission to kiss your crucifixion."

I nodded. He gently clasped my cheeks with his hands, then brought his lips to my forehead, kissing it five times: over my wound, under, to both sides, and then directly upon it. With the last, I erupted in sobs. To be able to share my age-old secret in the midst of its mutation, and to have it greeted with such intelligent tenderness, broke me open. Tears cascaded from my eyes and nose. A strange nectar welled up inside my mouth. My heart became a fountain, and the hot sweetness it gushed forth shot through the rest of my body in a branching slow-motion throb. In my mind's eye I saw an aerial view of a skyscraper imploding, its rock-hard skeleton and facade crumbling into billions of granules.

All my thoughts absconded, leaving my body free to act from its native wisdom. I leaned myself urgently into Jumbler, then pulled his face to mine and began to drink his mouth. My tongue undulated along the inside of his lips. I soaked in his surprising taste, a delicate honeysuckle. Streams of my tears flowed down into the mix, exciting me to spill even more.

As he responded to my swarming incursion, our bodies converged, our chests and bellies pressing together. Only then did I comprehend that I was embracing a woman. Her breasts billowed firmly against mine through the velvet and cashmere and flannel that separated them. But the extravagant dissonance did not short-circuit my passion; it only unleashed me further. Now, on top of my weeping, a wave of mournful hilarity struck, a rueful bliss that tempted me to howl or sing or make us collapse together on the floor. I resisted all of these. Through my blubbering laughter, I managed to carry on with the leisurely evolution of our grandiose kiss.

"I can guess why you are crying," Jumbler murmured in a quavering voice as we began to wheel lazily around the room in a demented foxtrot, "but what is so funny?"

"I just discovered a new way to kill the apocalypse," I said as I caressed her cheek with mine.

"Kiss all the bad guys the way you are kissing me?" she whispered as her open eyes brimmed.

"That's an idea. But I was actually referring to the fact that I somehow managed to turn a woman into a man for several hours."

"You did?" she said. She began to sniffle.

"Until a few minutes ago, I must confess," I babbled as my tears crescendoed again, "I was under a mistaken impression concerning your gender. But don't worry. It doesn't change my feelings about you in the least. In fact, I think it makes me feel even crazier."

Soon we were both embroiled in deep wailing sobs, our chests and throats heaving. I could not believe the volume of water that poured from us, or the soft violence of our convulsions. And yet we were both driven to keep kissing through the rising tumult.

The happy grief that had motivated my initial outbreak was expanding and mutating. No longer was I crying merely because I'd exposed my lonely secret to a smart playmate who had given me tenderness in return, nor because I'd had to make a sudden and shocking realignment of my perceptions about my playmate's gender. Those tear-jerking themes had become contagious, lighting up other sore points and hot spots within me. Now I was weeping in amazed excitement that this was the first person outside the Pomegranate Grail who had ever been completely real to me. I was weeping with gratitude that I was finally capable of becoming infatuated with an actual flesh-and-blood human. I was weeping in triumph as I ruminated on the increasingly stunning evidence that I'd done the right thing by running away.

And these were just a few of the epiphanies that were rushing forth, demanding to be wept for. I was spooked and curious at how wild my body felt. I was sad and thrilled at how rapidly I was changing. I melted with anguish and fear as I registered how severe a break I was making from my mothers and the Pomegranate Grail. My liaison with Jumbler was a dramatic upping of the ante in this divorce, not only because my mothers had decreed that I was not to seek any erotic connection before I was eighteen, but also because the lover I had chosen was an infidel, an outsider.

I cried, too, because I was feeling again, only more intensely, the poignant paradox Madame Blavatsky had taught me to feel a few hours ago in the Drivetime: gratitude for the inspirational violations my mothers had inflicted on me, for the ways they had forced me to find out my true destiny.

And why was Jumbler crying? I pledged to ask her when the time was right. For now, I could only guess. If she truly believed that in all our lifetimes together she had always loved me more than I loved her, then perhaps she was shaken to her root by how profoundly she had been able to touch me now, and how passionately I threw myself at her mercy. And perhaps she was crying because for the first few hours of our meeting, I didn't see her clearly enough to know that she was a woman.

Now and then, at the height of a fresh surge of lamentation, droplets actually launched themselves from our eyes, splashing down through the air into the confluence of moist flesh where we suckled each other. More often, a pearly flow trickled down our cheeks. However the elixir arrived, we welcomed it as a key ingredient in our kiss.

"In the fairy tale of Rapunzel," I whispered, "her tears have the power to cure the blindness of the prince. Do you have any blind spots that you would like me to cry on?"

We were still whirling dreamily around the room. During one sweep past the front wall, I had flicked the light switch off. Now, as we glided into the kitchenette, I doused the other. The space was lit only by the dim green glow of my alarm clock.

"I am so very close to healing an ancient split in my psyche," she said.

"Between?"

"Between being holy and having fun. For many lifetimes, I have tried to get them to originate from the same impulse. And now at last they are on the verge."

"So where should I anoint you with my tears?"

"Your tears need to reach the crucible inside me where I am trying to get my trickiness and my morality to mingle. It is a spot halfway between my heart and my navel."

"Then you must imbibe."

She licked the moisture from both my cheeks, then brought her lips just under the tear ducts of first my right and then my left eye, from which a seemingly inexhaustible supply streamed.

"Give me your potion, artful one," she sighed as she delicately supped. "Impregnate me with the secret of how to heal others with my pleasure."

I kept my eyes closed as she proceeded, working to visualize what it might mean for her to accomplish the synthesis she'd alluded to. Examples from the preceding hours immediately revealed themselves. The masterful way she had listened to the clerk at the Mexican food market, for instance. In one coordinated act, she had performed a kind service for the older woman and also used the occasion to do a magic trick which, she said, coaxed God to reveal a desired secret. But more than that. The entire series of fun events she had enacted with me was, I had no doubt, a holy ceremony that was as effective in invoking divine allies as any austere religious ritual could ever be. In fact, the more I meditated on it, the more I was sure that Jumbler was already a maestro in blending trickiness and morality.

"And now I will ask you another favor, dear Sin-Eater," Jumbler said, her lips poised again in front of mine. "As I pour all my sins into my tears, please eat them. Devour my sins, that I may be free of that which hinders my ability to become the most hedonistic servant of humanity possible."

As I set about my task, I visualized her tears filling up with any toxins she might be harboring in body or psyche. With my psychic eye, I saw oily vapors, wraith-like shapes, leaving their hiding place in her heart as they migrated into the tears that I was now disposing of. What specific bad behavior or negative habits might they correspond to in Jumbler? Excessive mysteriousness, perhaps? A tendency towards confabulation? I could not guess. But that didn't matter to me.

"If I was truly Robin the Mouth, the Sin-Eater, in a previous incarnation," I prayed silently, "let me tap into the powers I possessed then. Dear Persephone, help me melt down the torments and blights I'm absorbing, that they may become a source of beautiful raw energy for Jumbler and me."

As I sipped, Jumbler's sobs evolved into a half-rapturous, half-anguished moan, even as her tears continued to ripple.

"Do not stop," she whimpered. "It feels so real."

At the peak of her intensity, she let loose a breathy grunt and broke away from me.

"Unggggh," she said. "Got to lie down." She slumped over to the bed and lay down. "Come here," she commanded with a weak laugh.

"What happened?" I said, alarmed, as I slipped into position next to her.

"You made me come," she smiled, "in a manner of speaking."

"What manner is that?" I asked, confused but enjoying my confusion. My weeping, after a long copious run, was abating.

"You sucked down my sins so hard you brought on my period," she replied in a quietly maniacal voice.

"Oh. Sorry," I said, disappointed.

"Do not be sorry in the least," she said, shaking her head drowsily. "I have never felt so perfect in my entire life."

"You're lying," I cackled. "I hate people who call menstruation a curse, but it's not as if I ever heard anyone say it feels pleasurable."

"The onslaught of bleeding is always orgasmic for me."

Her streams of tears were following a different course now that she was lying on her side facing me.

"I'm flabbergasted," I said. "Flummoxed and flubadubbed." Delirium had begun to possess me, too.

"Not that I bleed all that often," she added with a cracked giggle. "Before tonight, it has been almost eleven months."

"Should I go out and buy you some pads?" I said, trying to force myself, against every inclination, to be practical. "I don't have anything here."

"No. Too late now. Let it flow. I apologize to your pajamas."

"But why has it been so long?"

Instead of answering, she grasped my head and pressed her whole open mouth around my mouth. It wasn't a kiss. She didn't flutter her lips or swirl her tongue. She simply held this pose and slowly breathed into my mouth, like a rescuer doing CPR. On her inhales, she maintained the seal, forcing me to exhale back into her.

To my surprise, I felt no instinct to pull away. As unnatural as it might have seemed to me in a more rational mood, I was enthralled with the searing intimacy of it all. From deep inside her body, warm, moist air wafted deep into my body. But it was more than air. Tasting and touching it now so vividly, its smoky persimmon amber, its maple syrup mingled with seawater, I had no doubt that it was thoroughly infused with her daimon, her life-force, the distilled essence of her most personal genius. And I returned her gift to her, suffused with my own concentrated potion. Now and then, one of us would unfurl a singing moan as we breathed out.

Gradually, I began to notice a fresh marvel. Or maybe it had been unfolding before, and I was just tuning into it. On her exhales, I saw but also felt a subtle ray of light streaming out of her teary eyes and into mine. There was an actual erotic sensation in my pupils, as if her dewy eyelight were a loving caress. As she inhaled, I sensed or maybe fantasized that she was drinking in an analogous beam from my gaze. Dear Goddess, I prayed, I am making love. Without stroking or churning or undulating, without doing anything more than breathing and looking, I was flooding with sexual pleasure. It sprang from my heart and my eyes as much as from my lowest chakra, and rippled out in pulsing spirals to the ends of me.

I swear that the very molecules of my lover's face began to vibrate and throb, until I imagined I was looking at an electrified cloud in the shape of an ever-shifting mask. The only constant, in her eyes, was a relaxed concentration mingled with mirthful excitement. She betrayed no restlessness, no distraction. There was nothing else we had to do, nowhere else to go, besides this. I felt utterly at home.

Our tears throbbed in celebration, tiny waves pulsing in rhythm to our heartbeats.