The Freewayfayers' Book of the Dead

by John Okas

  “But what if you’re lying to yourself?”

  “I only wish I could! Sister Klare said that the new lease on life I’ve been enjoying will continue only so long as I hide the truth from Gloria.”

  The sitter makes a face. As her inner dialogue of ideal point and practical counterpoint, the pros and cons of the issue, turn slowly in her mind, she munches on a cruller. Then she sniffs, “I don’t know about any of this, Sugar! But I think I know a crock of fish when I smell one. Keinar may be on the ball about some things, but she’s not God. The way I look at it, you’ve got to have moral principles that are positive not negative.”

  Sarah says, “Sister Klare says that morals are a practical necessity for those who want to control other people in families and in states, and must be instilled through fear. For those of us training for our wings, by the grace of the Lord, conventional principles can be dispensed with.”

  Laudette holds this line of reasoning dubious and withholds her absolution. She judges the medium’s purpose is solely to promote contact with out-of-this-world characters for the sake of being naughty, nothing else. If anything, Sarah’s rationalizations tip the scales in Laudette’s mind away from Lord Z’s ultra-violet humanism in favor of more fundamental X-oriented family values. “Sugar, I’m the last to agree with Keinar that this doubletalk will get you true happiness. The Dipster always said that to rest in peace, clean of your sins, you need more than a good dunking. And I suppose a purple hazing won’t satisfy either. What you need is an act of contrition, that’s what. Of course you have to try to make amends with those whom you wronged. But I think you don’t need any more amends. Why, you and Sir Harry are spoiling Baby rotten, giving her things left and right to try to pay her back for the damage you did her. Yes, it’s the confession part you’re weak on. As long as you think there’s something you ought to own up to, you’re not going to sleep calm, free, and happy. Yes, yes, no doubt about it, if you can tell me, and you can tell those fruity ladies, then you can tell Baby. Next time that child asks, or Sir Harry for that matter, even though he’s just about figured the whole thing out by now, you might as well tell them. You don’t want to keep it to yourself forever and ever do you? The Dipster always said that the time to be sorry is now or never.”

  “Then it’ll have to be never, Miss Lord. I can confess to heaven and hell and maybe even to Harry, but how in the world can I tell my little girl, to keep my price up for toads, I sent my prince down the road to his death?”

  “Sugar, you were young and confused. It’s as good an excuse as any. Also, you’ll never be free to talk to your Heavenly Father until you can show your baby that you’re only a human being who can make mistakes, and that your mistakes are partly to blame for why she’s never going to see her daddy, just as your daddy’s mistakes are partly to blame for why he’s never going to see you. You’ve got to have integrity to break the chain and get the family intact.”

  Sarah refuses to listen to what she doesn’t want to hear. She sighs and gets that faraway look in her eye, and goes back to her room to hide from the world, to comb her hair, powder her nose and chee-chee her “cheese.”

  Trouble Around the World

  On the first Friday in September, nineteen thirty-nine, when the medium channels the message and opens her flap-happy Svobodian lips with blankets of electromagnetic thought patterns, the word is that the secret lives of the saints will be pre-empted in order that Lord Z can carry a special report on trouble around the world. The intelligence tonight is not native, but military.

  “Bharani, Sisters, greetings. In my country we have a saying, ‘Keep details about lovers private, but spread the word about enemies.’ This broadcast is to be kept anything but classified.”

  “You mean we can tell tales out of bed?” A murmur goes around the circle in the square.

  “I urge you to,” the hairy voice rumbles. “You don’t have to be psychic to see war coming in the Old World, and inevitably the Freeway will be drawn into it. Normally, in the worldly war of good versus evil, the Clear Way is to be like the sun which shines on saint and sinner in the day and leaves them both in the dark at night. Clarions see the whole picture and understand the world turns on the theory of simple relativity: in order for one person, place or thing to be in the light, another has to be in the dark for contrast. But when weapons come into play and armies gather, unless we wish both sides to lose, we ought not stay neutral. We have no choice but to choose. The only way to change certain men’s minds is to kill them and destroy their force. The time has come for us to take a stand against someone. I’m talking about the Furor, Rudolph the red-nosed Reichmann, an absolute hell of a fellow, an evil beyond redemption. He’s doing things even relative devils like us can’t abide: sending thousands who don’t live up to his ideal of nationalistic uniformity to camps of death and torture in a campaign for racial purity. And not only has he stirred up a huge gang of Reichrepublikan juvenile delinquents, blond bloodthirsty animals called Nastis, to do the round-up and the railroading, but he has recruited several of my neighbors as evil eyes to envision him taking over the whole world.”

  “Your neighbors?” The fruits and nuts exclaim with wonder.

  “Reichmann is no fool. He wants to make sure he holds the really higher ground, the occult levels where causes are translated into effects. With control of the fruited plane, he expects to reap huge military victories here below. But to accomplish this he needs some super-special forces, agents who can go out of this world. Even as I speak, a party of his men are in the Pu Mountains making promises of temporal glory to any mastermind who will help him win friends and influence causative factors in high places. And there are, I’m sad to say, men and women with great mental abilities who don’t have to have their arms twisted or their noses broken to say ‘yes’ to an evil power. Several expert meditators have sold their souls to the devil and become boogies. Instead of shining their love lights, they are now knitting their brows, training their evil eyes, and focusing on seeing Rudolph have his sick dreams come true. Besides using negative visualization, they are twisting the powers they get from chanting. The sounds they utter are directed not for the benefit of everything that breathes, but as a heap of dirty language on everyone who’s not a true blue-eyed brown-shirt.”

  So, there’s ectoplasmic slime on the terror, psychic grease on the axis of Reichmann’s war machine. The fruits and nuts know what a positively out-of-this-world experience love can be. They all shiver to think that there are men and women of high spiritual caliber who are intent on discharging their inimical emotions as murder weapons. Among children it’s proverbial that sticks and stones will break your bones but names can never hurt you, and witches generally concur: they draw their power from the circle of light and darkness in their hearts, rather than the Word. However they can allow that smutty talk, a smear campaign, and negative propaganda, if it turns into mass hysteria, can be almost as offensive as guns and bombs. Properly loaded with hate, sentences can kill.

  “Lord, be our spell-proof vest in times of trouble!” Sarah shoots off her mouth on behalf of her sisters.

  “A good offense is the best defense in this case, Bharani, Sisters. The Furor’s soldier boys can be defeated by bullets, but we need rarer elements than lead to overcome the waste, death, and destruction on earth these tough nuts and rotten apples are out to create from the higher planes. To combat them we’re going to have to fly missions to loftier battle sites, ones that the regular air force can’t get to. In reality the enemy can be anywhere, but especially, in the most insidious place: within us. For instance, one needn’t go to the Reichrepublic to find racial injustice. Right here on the Freeway there are soldiers who are not willing to fight for freedom in the same platoon with men of other races.”

  So now the Sisters see: the coming war will be more than just a struggle of men’s military might. It’ll also be a test of the women’s practical application of their Sisterhood.

  Under these circumstances, they wonder
, should we still take it lying down?

  “More than ever,” says the Great Monkey. “The biggest wrench we can throw into the Furor’s works is to be as spineless as jelly. For what is a stand opposite hatred if not horizontal? First and foremost, keep loving your husbands and your boyfriends as yourselves. Once the fighting starts to heat up, we’ll need a surplus of love. But it’s going to take more than the rise you get from love’s rockets’ red glare to hold the fort against Rudolph. Simply making out is not going to be forceful enough.”

  What else are we good for? The thought spreads through the group stemming from the doubts some of the women have about themselves as effective people.

  “Whatever else, you are all for one and one for all. The one strength evil lacks is the power of alliance. The ability to make trustworthy friends is unknown to it. The good, however, are always willing to put aside selfish differences for political ends. When the line is drawn, blessed are those of different religions or ideologies who will readily band together against a common enemy, and genuinely wish one another well on the outcome, not be waiting around to knock their allies off the first time their backs are turned.”

  Now, deep in the throat of Lord Death’s grave and gritty blue tone, a little voice pipes up. It has a light, cool, handsome, devil-may-care manner, that of a proper Brutish gentleman with a high-fluting accent. The little voice, the circle of women learns, belongs to Father Freeman Fetter Fife, the Disembodied Head of Intelligence Operations for a branch of the High Church of Inkland which officially doesn’t exist, the Salvation Air Force.

  Fearing some sort of Brutish Inquisition, some of the women begin to squirm and cringe as if they were burning at the stake already. But the little voice assures them he is friend, not foe. “Even though for centuries the Church has chased you fairies underground, made it off-limits to worship trees, burned your books, and even burned some of you, faced with the Furor, we hope you’ll be willing to let bygones be bygones, pull together, and let us help one another in our common cause whether we share the same moral and religious attitudes or not.”

  Not saying another word, he leaves a silence so the woman can hear ye olde isle of gramarye alive and ticking inside him. He lets out a stream of hot air that sounds like ‘hisss’ and there is a spray of assent from those in the know, fond of fondling snakes. The Bharani Sisters sing a song of sibilance, joining agent Double F Fife spraying Reichmann with every breath they take.

  A short wave later Lord Z patches in his former archenemy, now his ally, Mother Goose for psychic victory gardening lessons. Again, in the mother tongue, a little voice gives them the lowdown on organic methods of warfare using fowl language.

  Look for nature in the bushes,

  between your legs and in your tushes.

  Love your boyfriends, husbands, brothers,

  love one another and one another’s lovers.

  In war-making foul can be even fairer!

  I call you to wing, Sisters of Bharani-Sarah.

  Under Mother Goose’s lead they go agaggle in their minds on manure manoeuvres. In chevron flight, the Nussbaum irregulars are the silly goose squadron. They lower the boom, and let Rudolph have their payload, bombs away. Tooting fruity, they rain their mental intestiny, Donder and Blitzen, on Reichmann.

  May worms on Rudolph’s red nose feast

  and a pox consume his snorter.

  May his blood bubble like brewer’s yeast

  and a rabbi marry his daughter.

  They may sound silly but the jingles jangle a nerve in Sarah. The rhyming spells make it seem like old times, and remind her of the days when she would recite doggerel couplets and receive unadulterated Purple Hazings from her Horny God. The medium and the message are not always the same. While Keinar would still advise against it, Mother Goose prompts Sarah … Mother Goose prompts Sarah to call the dogs of war and get in touch with Lord Z directly.

  Bharani and Bharavi alone up in the Blue,

  fused together in a Big Celestial Screw.

  You can be a model to the suffering sorry world

  of ecstacy in agony, of riding on the curl …

  Sarah is tempted to set an example, to spend one more blazing moment with her Lord, and have that moment last forever not as flesh, but as the symbol of creative voidness, the model of everrenewability, selflessness, and compassion for those tormented by humanity’s inhumanity. She understands that it could be a suicide mission. That thought thrills her. But the thought that it might cause the debilitation of her Lord causes her to refrain. She exercizes her power by not exercizing her power.

  At the close of the meeting the voice of Lord Z returns, enjoining them to increase their numbers. “Bring friends and lovers to meetings, and any enemies who will come.”

  Afterward Sarah calls her husband and tells him that the meetings are now open to everyone, and that he should come to learn about the Lord, and hear the Great Rumble and the little voices speak. “Harry, my earthly darling, you are my fellow soldier. Lord Z wants you.”

  He looks at the beautiful peach’s white dove breasts and moon white buttocks and shakes his head. “Me? Become a witchman? Bah! You are nuts!”

  “But since you are mixed up with me, you are also nuts! You know you’re a practitioner of the Craft. When we have relations you represent the Lord. From now on when we love, we will offer our spirits in defiance of the Nasti Reichmann and the black magicians he has enlisted.”

  He’s never heard such humbug as these stories of soul-travel, Shalamar, and Swami Shores, and he’s not one for hearing voices or engaging in psychic warfare. Even so, when she orders him into the trench, the love brigade’s foxhole on the front line, he doesn’t flinch an inch.

  The Sap of Sisterhood

  The radio keeps them all abreast of new developments on land and sea and air. In the summer of nineteen forty Rudolph has a svasticle flag flying over Gourmet cafes and armies of Germ Men goose-stepping down the Elysian Fields. In the meanwhile his air force is making life hell for the Grammarians across the channel.

  As men go to war, the sap of sisterhood rises worldwide. The women bring friends, lovers, and ex-lovers to their meetings. Sometimes nearly forty men and women are in attendance. Rather than drifting downstream, half-asleep, drooling with the drowsy frowzy pleasures of dilly-dalliant storytelling, they perk up their rabbit ears, and sit or lie by. In his Voiceless Voice Lord Z briefs them on the progress of the lighter-than-air side of the war. It rumbles, in varying degrees, the newcomers’ extrasensory wavelength. And other little voices from the fruited plane continue to crop up. The most commonly heard are those of Double F speaking His Majesty’s piece, and Mother Goose with her dirty doggerel cursery rhymes.

  Make us rubber,

  and Rudolph glue.

  Let his shit bounce off us

  and stick to his shoe.

  Sarah’s appetites are whetted by the voices she hears at meetings. Yet she feels the pull to go out of bounds balanced by the freedom to ignore it. She favors personal safety over self-sacrifice. Since it is normal for her to go in two directions at the same time, she is a natural at composting her life, doing her duty bit by bit. She can easily find her darkest hours by following her brightest and watching her inevitable departures from them. She concentrates on her psychological faults and moral perversities, her guilt, her weaknesses, her frittering away of life and love, her contrariness, self-betrayal, self-loathing and, most importantly, her self-destructiveness. Under Mother Goose’s direction, She distills from these, her own most radical impurities, an extract, a black mass, a natural heavier-than-lead waste product. At her morning sitting, she pens bad poetry, just as she shoots her cannons at Rudolph. The simple offensive weapon is at the same time fertilizer for the green plot of peace on earth the victory gardener is trying to grow.

  While this metaphysical patchwork is operating in the flower and vegetable fields of her mind, it puts a tingle in her appetites and connects those passions to why they are there in the first pla
ce. Rolling along with her husband, she finds she is charged with the whole vicious cycle of love, death, decay, and birth. Her juices flow with inklings of mother-to-be love.

  “Harry darling,” she says, “the round of birth and death is such that every turn deserves another. One dies and another is being born. With so much death in the world Lord Z says it’s more normal than usual to be in the mood for mating, not only for its intangible benefits as a means to combat hate, but to help renew the world’s population.”

  Harry has heard enough. “Lord Z!” he snorts. “Can’t we have a moment together without that imaginary friend of yours coming up?”

  “Come on, Harry, this is serious. What’s at the bottom of sex but the urge to be fruitful and multiply? Lately I’ve been thinking: what if I wanted to conceive a child? What do you say?”

  He sighs. The bats in the lovely woman’s belfry are always trying new tintinnabulations. He has never pictured himself as a father, and surely sees young Sarah, just over thirty, in the most perfect shape imaginable, as a babe herself. The pleasure of having so pretty and fresh a woman, a cherry at the peak of picking time, a ripe peach so often in creamy heat, is not one he wants to share with a little mouth. His woman should be his mother, his maid, his mistress, his cherry tart, his art on a pedestal, his fantasy toy for boy play, his queen, his idealized, cherished angel who can be charmed or bought. Literal children with their demands and general helplessness have an unfair edge on getting the attention of the female of the species.

  Of course, not Gloria! Thank goodness for that little girl. She’s never been one to hang on to her mother for anything. Why, if I did have a child, I wish she could be like Gee Bee, self-reliant, a genuine pleasure to spend time with. I doubt Sarah will be so lucky the second time.