The Freewayfayers' Book of the Dead

by John Okas

  With Sarah gone, Keinar out of the picture, Laudette once again starts denying she ever saw any monkey business. “It’s not that I lied,” she says to Gloria. “The devil made me say it. I confessed because that darn witch Keinar put me under some kind of hypocritical spell. Things were confusing back then. Your mother was suffering so. We were in a new house. I’m really not sure what I saw. Just thinking about it gets me all mixed up.”

  Now that the old sitter is once again swearing she never saw the monster, the matter acquires compounded ambiguity. Certainly the evidence is inconclusive. And the witnesses, one drunk, one mad from guilt and grief, and one who recants her story, are each unconvincing. In the end, Gloria decides, whether the Horny God literally exists or not has little bearing on her life. What she can’t see, hear, touch, taste, or smell, does not exist. The war does not touch her. Yes, she has her own ideas about how mind might rule matter. But she is an isolationist. She believes in live and let live. For her magic is not about trying to control, regulate, dominate, or change the world, but about accepting things as they are, herself as she is, others as they are. Of course, young Glory has only experienced benign restrictions to her freedom, such as by Laudette and Saint Bernard’s staff. Her philosophy does not take into account the measures one might be forced to take were one physically beset by a political malignancy such as the Nastis. After all, if one human being is oppressed because of race, by extension, since one’s birth is an unavoidable act of nature, aren’t we all? However, parentless, Gloria feels her life is perfectly right. Now that her mother is out of the house, the path is clear for her dreams of being the playgirl of the western world to materialize.

  She settles into her stride: an even, self-involved keel. She goes to school, acts cool, comes home, reads, listens to the radio or record player, or plays the piano. She eats and sleeps and loves herself with juicy feelings at bedtime. Nothing special, her life seems routine, but in her mind she is grateful for it and mystified by its ordinariness.

  On the second day of February she receives several letters with colorful stamps and odd postmarks. Her mother has safely crossed the Titanic Ocean. The ship she is aboard is slowly skirting the Dark Continent delivering supplies where needed. It is apparent she will not be back soon.

  In the muse’s eye everyday life is a miracle, nevertheless it is a great day in Black history when the big baby, in response to her mother’s letters, decides she’s outgrown the children’s wing and, deaf to Laudette’s protests, moves downstairs into the big bedroom suite. She finds a fresh chute of white Shunyu silk in the linen closet and covers the bed with it. A baptist before everything, she wastes no time filling the big tub with hot water and scented bubbles, and finally gets the soft soaking she feels she deserves.

  Then she pulls the curtains back, stops, looks, and wonders before she leaps. Am I taking over the magic bed, or is the magic bed taking over me? Will I be ravaged by strange monsters? Will a bizarre chain of events lead up to my death? Or will I be happy beyond my wildest dreams?

  The fabric in the curtains billows like sails on a ship. The silk canopy swells balloonishly, softening her descent into the softness. She smiles. Home at last! On her first night she encounters nothing even remotely like the turbulence which intruded upon her mother on her first night therein, no ghosts visit her, no invasion of monster men, no purple people-eaters, yet she does find something like her mother’s fruity experience. Gloria feels her body dissolved in a peaceful buzzing bee dream, a care-free flower-field unconsciousness. In the morning the content of her dreams escapes her, leaving her wanting to go back to sleep to rejoin them. Laudette must bang a pot with a metal spoon to get her off to school.

  Gloria sees how it works: her Mummy’s destiny is forerunner to her own. She never doubted her future would be between the covers of the Homeric conjugal plot, that she, not her Mummy, would be the bed’s queen mother, and its ultimate sweet dream baby, but she never understood how habit-forming the bed Homer built would be. She never seems to get tired of sleeping there, slipping into those deeply engrossing dreams which take her beyond the far reaches of her imagination. Sleep becomes the leading edge of the muse’s routine.

  However methodical Gloria’s way, odd happenstance continues to follow her mother. Late in February Gloria gets a letter from East Jujuba in which Sarah writes,

  I have nothing concrete to report except for some wonderful luck. It turns out there is a husband and wife on this boat who are heading for Poong. Of all places and of all people! They are Doctor and Mrs Haddock-Watt! He is the famous Poongi scholar, the man who translated The Poongi Book of the Dead. Needless to say, we have much in common and get along famously. The fluke of fate goes even further: the Haddock-Watts are going to the same area where I feel I’m heading. They have a teacher who I’m hopeful will know the whereabouts of the One I’m looking for. I have some confidence I’m on the right track!

  In early March a letter comes bearing a stamp cancelled with strange characters that look like scimitars. Gloria can tell her mother has reached the mysterious east.

  … an endless trip, haven’t had a decent meal in months. Mahabharata is hot as blazes. I don’t look forward to the long train ride. At least I have the Haddock-Watts to show me the way. It may be hard to get a letter to you from here on out. There’s so much I want to tell you but I don’t know where to begin. Even though we never spent much time together, I want you to know, Mummy loves you. You never knew your real father, but, well, someday, I hope soon, you will understand I did it for you …

  Glory is not sure whether these written equivocations, these pitiful attempts at apology, are for deserting her or for depriving her of her father. Nor does she care. She thinks like Harry Swan: if a parent wants to be free of you, you might as well be free of that parent.

  What does it matter if Mummy saves the whole world and can’t be on the line with her own child? When I grow up and have children, there will be nothing I won’t be able to discuss with them. At any rate I won’t be a burden to them, keeping them worrying about my health and safety. And in the meanwhile I’m not going to be making any amends for the sins of my mother.

  She throws Sarah’s epistle into the fire, tosses the atlas right in after it, and allows her over-riding interest of life on the inner springs to stretch to its fullest extent. She goes through the motions in school as if her back didn’t have a bone, daydreaming of the metaphysical, the bed within, and things in this world beyond any earth science, history, or geography. Her friends find her cooler and weirder than ever. Laudette and her teachers warn her about the wages of laziness, but to no avail. She fails more than history and geography. She brings home a report card with six red strikes against her: F in everything, including music. When the fall comes all her classmates will go ahead into ninth grade but Gloria will find herself doubling eighth, if she doesn’t make up the work in summer school.

  “Poor Baby!” Laudette crows. “I told you so. Now you have to spend all of July and August cracking school books.”

  “In no girl’s life should there be a summer of going to school, Lawdy. I’d much rather repeat this year next year.”

  “Why, Baby, you’re almost as tall as Sir Harry. Just think of how stupid you’re going to look sitting in the eighth grade again. And won’t you miss your friends?”

  Gloria shrugs, “They’re not my real friends anyway. Whether people hang with me or not I don’t care.”

  The cool kitten indifference infuriates the sitter. “Well, go ahead, be a big baby, spend the whole summer in bed, I don’t care either.”

  Of course Laudette does care, and worries herself into a case of podiatric warts that Gloria’s life is going down the same dark road of total failure as her mother’s.

  Inevitably Gloria, as her mother did, claims more territory in the second story apartments. She spreads out, back into the Suite of Roses, as well as the hall of mirrors, and on to the other bedroom and bath. There is one thing that bothers her though: right n
ear where she sleeps in the big bedroom, directly across from the wardrobes, tucked in behind the hall of mirrors, are a pair of locked doors and, search as she has, she cannot find the key. She can see by the displaced space that behind those doors is a closet large enough to stable a team of ponies. She tries picking the lock with a hair pin, but it’s no use. Then one hot, humid night in early July while she is lolling around in bed, enjoying cool spots of silk, her outstretched arm jiggles a wiggle on a nail tacked to the inside face of the bedpost nearest the armoire. She finds a key that might very well be the one she’s been looking for. She wastes no time testing her hunch. Click. The door opens.

  The first thing she notices is a drop in temperature. Not only is the room cooler, it seems much drier. She can feel on the bottoms of her bare feet that the floor is stone and her nose tells her the sealed-in freshness comes from the walls. She runs her hands along the cedar panel inside the door feeling for the light switch. Again, click, and her eyes open wide. The first thing she sees, in the far corner, is a stuffed bear, a huge grizzly thing, a memento of her Daddy-o’s bachelor pad days. There are also the taxidermied heads of a moose, a zebra, and a crocodile as well as a bald eagle, loaded with filler and wires, wings spread as if in flight.

  And there, right beside Harry’s hunting trophies, is her mother’s own death row: furs in storage.

  So this is where Mummy keeps them!

  Gloria is well aware of her mother’s ambivalence about wearing the skins or other body parts of creatures killed for human vanity. Even while, on many occasions, she has heard Sarah strongly condemn such casual taking of animal life, she would nevertheless see her regularly sporting the fur coats and leather jackets her Daddy-o brought home as presents. Gloria touches each garment, getting a flash of the life that was once in it, feeling that there is still some excitement present, if not from the animal’s departed spirit, then from the lingering, subtle aura of her mother’s fetishism. Gloria does not share her mother’s constraints, qualms, and fixations. She knows that decadence and growth are the two sides of nature. All animals strut and preen at mating, proud of their vanity rather than ashamed of it. If minks ruled the world coats would be made of human skin, and no mink would lose sleep over it.

  But the room is more than a reliquary of animals slaughtered for no good reason. A long wall of shelves houses Sarah’s private library. Here Gloria finds the valuable first editions and rare volumes given her mother by a man she used to pose for. In a place of honor, on a shelf by themselves, pressed against one another by crystal book-ends, are the complete writings of the noted rucksack bard Clement Collier.

  Here also is Sarah’s collection of major and minor arcana, those manuals of the occult, everything from the The Poongi Book of the Dead to recipes for magic ink, books that she’d been collecting since that day she stumbled into the Paradise lost in grief and remorse for her lost buck. In her privileged position as Mrs H Thornton Swan Junior, she has spared no expense fleshing out this agglomeration and has every book she can find on casting spells, binding them, and loosing them. The shelves include many rare volumes on the transphysical sciences from astrology to zoanthropy, books on cabalism, supernaturalism, metaphysics, parapsychology, extrasensory perception, telepathy, divination, sorcery, hoo doo, voo doo, ju ju, mojo hands, magic circles, squares and triangles, ghost dances, astral projections, evocations, incantations and trickerations. There are extraordinary cookbooks and herbals of intoxicating and medicinal plants. Several shelves are devoted to the Clear Way Scriptures, books on yoga and lamaism. Most impressive is an assortment of alchemical texts, several so old as to be actually hand-written, with pages preserved under chipping coats of lacquer. Gloria finds a copy of The Good Book, dog-eared and leather-bound, that is all marked up in red and black with her mother’s critical notes. Right next to it is a black composition book with the words The Freewayfarers’ Book of the Dead set down neatly in her mother’s plain Prophet’s School hand. It is her mother’s Craft diary, Sarah’s verbal translations of what transpired inside the circle of fruits and nuts.

  The debate about whether to open it is short. Gloria respects the privacy of others, but obviously, if there is something she should know about this bed and the Craft, she’s sure her mother would want her to find out. Of course, even were this not the case Gloria’s curiosity is overwhelming. She takes the notebook back to bed and opens to the first page. The writing is exact, but there is something unusual about the way the words hang together; they go around in free-association chanting circles rather than form proper sentences. “… moon shine day shine night shine sun shine moon shine sun light dark night dark day dark light dark moon sun …” Intuitively she understands that these words were not written to be read, but for the power released in the writing. Power? In Gloria’s book such incantations are a waste of time, a sign of weakness, and fear of life. Yet scanning the lines, leafing through the pages, does give her a feel of the most basic, naked truth of existence: that real life has more mysteries than explanations, that the world as it is is devoid of meaning, categories, and purposes. The cryptic trail of words, plainly acknowledged as “straight from the Lord through the medium’s mouth”, leads her to the conclusion that in essence the Friday night mysteries are not so different from her own inner predilections.

  She comes to a section where Sarah kept actual minutes of the meetings, paragraphs with recognizable plots, descriptions of the ecstasy of union with Lord Z, as well as the pea’s reflections on this union, her suffering and her exultation. There are notes about living persons who have intercourse with dead ones, and mythic personae who never lived at all. Although she does not accept them literally, she finds her mother’s narratives appealing. They whet her appetite. She has no doubt as to the reality of her appetite. In spots the prose is so fervent, the love songs so corny, it even makes the tan girl blush. The lyrical abandon gives Glory a peek at the romantic side of the Nussbaum irregulars. Then there are accounts of the battles over the fruited plane, an explanation of how the world becomes smaller through war, notes on being a woman in a man’s world, and a man in woman’s world, and finally how beauty and the beast, in their ever-changing cosmic play, expect to live happily for the time being on this three-dimensional rock called earth, in one big jelly roll romance of nature, politics, religion, and art.

  Gloria is pleased to see that her mother was not always bogged down, depressed, but could in fact be a thinking woman. It comes as an eye-opener to Gloria that much of her mother’s notebook shows such exhiliration! Realizing the burning passion with which Sarah loved and fought, Gloria can begin to understand how the war could be affected over the airwaves, and how, even though the reports in the papers and on the radio say that the enemy is still plenty dangerous, the war might be over before it is over. That night she dreams in three dimensions and living color about literal beings on the wing like birds, Body Saints who have gained victory over death, invisible men flying in and out the window, as well as a pair of night sprites from her childhood. When she wakes, she remembers her dreams. Fairy tales so real, she almost expects to find the fairies hiding under the bed.

  Gloria also reads the history of the house with interest. The story in Sarah’s Craft diary follows Ulysses beyond this plane and maps out his travels and travails in the after-life, how he met Lord Z when the latter was just a fledgling magician, and how Z learned the art of splitting in two from Mother Goose and broadcasted a semi-solid copy of himself halfway around the physical earth, smack into her mother’s lap. She learns how the two hit it off and why they needed mediation and meditation to form a more perfect union. She reads some notes her mother wrote on the practice of yoga, including a description of a stretch of the spine and the pelvis that aims one in the direction of facing one’s bottom. “You lie on your back, put your knees to your ears and stretch your neck forward …” Gloria has to give it a try. It is easier said than done.

  Yes, it is inevitable. Succeeding her mother in the bed, being surrounded b
y the books her mother read, the clothes her mother wore, reading from her mother’s Craft diary, makes the beautiful Bee feel less pity and more love for her physically distant “Mummy.” The child never dreamed the woman was like her at all.

  Gloria is particularly delighted to find the “adults only” section, where Sarah kept her explicit esoterica: literature, novellas by “anonymous” authors, and “art” books that feature sketches and photographs of nude models, mostly beautiful boys. She likes the looks of one naked blond boy facing the camera, baby-faced, on his knees, eyes closed, mouth wide open, touching himself. In the photograph is a clear shot of that mysterious tidbit known as a normal penis, erect, no genital pathlogy, no botched circumcision, no chipped stone. And nuts in the pink look a lot more appetizing than the watery, sickly ones in the library, or the little gobs of paint or stone in the museum. On every page this photographer shows sensitivity to the light and the mood of the subject. It is all so very exciting she wonders whether she should share her find with Thalia, or keep it all to herself. She turns to a page where the beautiful boy is bent over the back of a chair with his buttocks raised and spread, his anus open, his young, tender scrotum hanging down. Gloria’s heart pounds, her flesh softens.

  Mummy dearest, I never knew you went for this sort of thing, but good for you! I wish I’d gotten to know you better.

  There are more revelations in store. On one of the lower shelves of the hidden library she finds a treasure chest, with jewelry, gems, solid gold chains, wrist and ankle bracelets, many with bells, crosses, crescents, stars or other charms. Gloria finds a violin case at the bottom of the trunk. She opens it and finds an unusual ivory object, one cool cucumber, or maybe more like a mushroom with a smooth slender cap and a long stem. Inexperienced, she can only guess what it might be used for. Too excited by her discoveries to consider the implicated incest, she pokes it up under her skirt, and tests her assumption on the spot.