CHAPTER 34
They met every Wednesday for lunch for three months. He made his reports promptly. Dictated tapes which he gave the boy. He believed in the boy.
Frank did not dictate what had happened, just what he knew they would understand. After all, I’m not talking with dad!
That his father would have understood, this Frank knew upon his first coupling with Rose. There had never been a moment’s doubt that they would couple—everything they did...the slight formal embrace upon meeting, his first kiss of her submissive lips, their shared glances, how she sat at his feet, his feeling that he should pick her up, throw her up in the air as if a little kid, all were just steps, inevitable.
When she touched him, it was as if he were unfolding. She was the Rose, but he was all petals being picked, falling, fluttering up into the air upon her breath, parachuting down, safe upon the floor drawn by the gravity of her desire. She picked him apart. He was all simply a deflowered stem.
She swallows him.
Frank—back when he had begun to ingest the Counter-Culture—had read as much in translation as he could of “Ancient Wisdom from the Far East.” Confucius, Tao Te Ching, I Ching, various pearls of wisdom, Buddhism as it conquered, Zen, “the whole Chinese menu!”…then, the Kama Sutra, especially. He carried the stereotype of the shy eyed, subservient Asian Woman. In Rose, it was all this, plus.
The plus being that her submission is such that as he penetrates her she not only yields, not only surrenders, but becomes liquid, a fluid not just of her delta wetness but of her inner offering—she wants to be absorbed.
Rose receives him onto her gentle frame...bones which have withstood Grand Wars, Earth-gouging bombardments, skin splatter of anti-personnel bombs, the rapes of a thousand soldiers: all of conquering tongues—Chinese, Japanese, French, American, even Vietnamese…he knows how she has survived—she becomes invisible. For as he gathers her flesh for his consumption...the slightest of licks upon her black-stone nipples, the tenderest of presses along the hard plowed plain of her belly, the gentlest of breezes which scatter her pearl ears, her satin neck...the beseeching lies of his heart: I love you...not to be spoken, rather to be confessed—a tortured confession which only pleasure can so exact…as she receives him so does he receive her: invisible.
Report—“They wear the armor of invisibility. You look for them on the ground and they are under the ground. You look into their slaying eyes and you see “friendlies.” You drop anti-personnel bombs but only kill field animals. You can set all on fire—napalm them as candles—but you will not see ten for the one you so enflame.”
“What the fuck does this mean?” A CIA intelligence officer.
Another hand—one of another Intelligence scams and memorizes, takes the report...a hand of a “Prior” who looking like a Major walks across the room, enters what appears to all as a brilliantly white door—so some call it the White Room—yet, inside is The Bright.
The Bright—down and sinuously coiling further down into a spot no locating sonar could find...only a room to any who first enter—and Top Security clearance is not even allowed—those who do enter have been entering in that way handed down by their father’s father’s fathers….
Rose, Frank was certain, is illiterate. He blots out the thought that she is stupid, just a tool, only a courtesan—he could not even think “whore.”
Everything about her which was less, he wanted to turn into more.
He was with her, and a step behind was the consciousness that he was not.
That to her, he was invisible.
That he...what could he say—was a god to her? Tall, American, White…a dick which was as long as any five she had previously sucked...a catastrophic cock which inserted itself into, metamorphosing her spine—a phallus which suckled her imitative clit and milked, absorbed all her desires into the pleasure he gave her in return. He was a Great Waterfall, a Roaring Rapids, not just a come or an ejaculation or a fucking spurt… no!...he baptized her, he rescued her from the flood.
Shit, I am the flood!
She was delta to his Mighty Mississippi…yet, What do I believe about her?
It was what he believed about her which revealed to him what he could know about her men: the male inside her—simply, “It’s not there.” He wrote a short paragraph, slipping back into psychological description: “An animus without an anima.” A statement he knew would choke any orthodox Jungian—“But how else to speak the truth?”
He knew her men had nowhere to go except here.
For them she was all...all they could handle—believe—that this was their country; their land; not the Earth—they were not global conquerors.
They had not the Shade Mother within them—he had not found “it” and: fucked her every which way but up—Ha!—cranked every hole.
Reports—“They will not eat their young.”
Shade Mother—as he had come to grasp America...the Puritans...the Anabaptist Revolution...it was not the absence of the feminine—How wrong the “Feminine Mystique”!—but only that truncated, crippled, carnivorous, predatory masculine which the Dark Feminine permitted, wanted, used … here: Family Honor with its culture of shame and not guilt...why Guilt? because of parricide—who drove Oedipus wild? His father? Nay, his mother!
Inside the gook’s woman Frank—all not crystallized into words yet, not the monograph for publication—he had sought his male and found only the husk of a body...not just Adam without a Rib, no, more, a slain body, cut up, Sacrificed: slashed, whipped, burned, gashed, gored...hollowed out and so hallowed—here inside Rose was the male who wanted and understood “homeland”—hum—so unlike his Western kin—same species? Not in soul!
For this War in Indochina, this savaging of Vietnam, this “Winning Hearts and Minds” could never be won because all the gooks were, were women, not men: homebodies: not Warriors in the mold of the Shade Mother—She who eats her young, whose males become Real by being Warriors: slaying and slicing up and consuming their young.
There was a harmony and balance here which Frank viscerally puked upon—inside her his cock spit out not sperm but distaste, repulsion, disdain...he knew she’d let him fuck her and fuck her and fuck her just so that she could keep her land, guard her hearth, hold the fort: Shit!
Frank’s report was fully understood...those within The Bright accepted his coordinates, his markers, his outline of this map: map of their Enemy—they, his dad, counseled the President to de-escalate, “Find a way to extricate ourselves with a winning attitude!”
I believe that as I touch you, I only touch myself.
“Shit!” the half-second-behind conscious realization whacked him: “I don’t want that!”
Courtesan. Concubine. Harlot. Whore. Bimbo. Dumb broad. Cunt!
Frank is angry.
Frank is believing...but fiercely punching at it from his conscious side—believing: I am not one of you. I am not your family.
It is simply too much! Pain. Battle ache. Fatigue. Hot searing wounds. Bullet impacted crushed bone amputated limb shrapnel slit eyes pain:
I believe that I am revealing the truth.
I believe that we all yearn for this truth.
I believe that we all can be Restored to Perfection.
Perfection. “Restored to, yes. Here, no!” Frank hates the East. All of it. The thoughts of it. The foul, piss-on-the-streets Buddhism of it. The grinding dust mouthed village poverty of the animistic shamanism of it. The obscene, choking, stultifying polluted Hinduism of it. The sad, broken-down, embarrassing Christian Triumphalism of the Missionaries of it. Flashing through his mind is everything he had learned in every course on religion, spirituality, mythology, altered states, sexual politics, psychoanalysis.
Frank’s conscious mind screaming...running amos...savagely tearing at its nakedness, ripping off its sensate body, gouging itself, throwing itself away.
“I can’t breathe,” suffocated, but meaning,
“Unimaginable!”
Half-awake, groggy—Pills?—the swishing sound is his whole being: ocean waves?
The helicopter tilts: his body presses hard against the straps: “Safe!”—inside himself he sighs a deadening, dulling, blanking sigh: Escaped!
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