CHAPTER 11
The Third Cauldron was everything the previous Cauldrons and previous years were not.
As much as the first Fixed years and the First Cauldron were a release, a plunge, a delving into, an exploration of ..."Explosion!" is how Cilla phrased it, but only to other girls...an explosion of S-E-X!—sexual imagining...they were to imagine themselves sexy...and all imaginings were acceptable, good, not to be refused, so, as much as the First was the Entrance into something they had never experienced so was the Third not just an Exit but another Entrance—but one (unknown to all) which might not be found!
"Third time is a charm," was an ancient maxim which had a peculiar twist, for it could be anything but charming.
But it was charm which had to be or be found or be that which found you. As the other two were Cauldrons where others explored you as much as you did them, so this Third was where you explored yourself. It was interior, inward, internal..."Am I charming?"
The question was personal. Direct. Singular. The sounds from just one other would be the only affirmation—that Yes so tremblingly desired. Just one other; only.
In the First, there were hardly questions and answers. Hardly any requests. All seemed to flash along, burst out, flare up like firework fuses...just a strike, a match’s flame and your world was changed—Floosh! body, mind and soul!
A boy didn’t have to speak to the others. It was just their glances. And to each girl they were all adoring. Clawing. Clutching. Sometimes a press too hard: a bruise. But, all in all, adoring.
One was adored...as Lilith and Cilla had been...simply because she was a female: scent. No girl stalled a moment to think the thought of Why? Why think any thought which would cause one to pause? For there was hardly a moment between embraces. Nary seconds between waves of lustful heat. The sweat of desire sprinkled them, drew their young, aching bodies closer—was that perfume strange to rutting heat and passion. The more each firked, the more all firked...the more frenzied, the more frenetic, the more orgasmic, the more absolutely totally and completely calm did each and everyone become.
It was an ordering and orderliness only the teachers anticipated—a progression as well as procession...a fact they did not share with their charges.
It was, simply, Cauldron. One of a most youthful, boisterous and boastful energy which when mingled, stirred, cooked generates and creates something new—presence.
Oh, there were words! Shouts. Vigorous screeches. Lashing screams. Thrashing gutturals and half-formed sounds and twice-uttered ejaculations and tongue-twisting blasts, snorts, howls, and groans. Sounds endless.
Yet, a placidity. A silence. At times a collective catching-of-the-breath...a taut mutedness. It was an awareness of, the acceptance of, a stunned reverence towards something uniquely forged, produced, evolved...it was a moment beyond itself—birthing.
For the First was riveted by punctuated ascensions. "Communal Epiphanies," again, a teacher’s words, shared not with the students.
This is what the First delivered—the imagining of a novel sexual presence wherein it was grasped that "My cock is your cock." "Your cunny is my cunny."
Cilla wanted the line to be long...long-long. For the cumulative heat to melt the walls, set afire the curtains. She collected the differences. The looks of wonder, of abandonment, of hesitation...from those which marveled at the sight of her breasts, those who clamped shut with the pulsating squeeze of her cunny—especially, the ones which were bright-eyed, almost weepy at the instant of post-climax, with orbs celestial, dying yet in their flame-out, expressing, offering up, setting free hymns of gratitude, odes of thanks-giving, skips and hops of joy!
Ah! She is pleasantly remembering.
Zav had come armed with the special gift of his poetic heart. This is how he saw himself. Each boy did see himself differently. If each had to issue a statement, write a letter, or in any way verbally offer his seduction, he would have found words, however brusque, however stumbling, to declare, "I am different," and so imply, "Embrace me!"
Poetic heart. It was his phrase, "Has any other said likewise?" Not in his high school, not in any classes until college...and here, only one other who seemed to have the same sense Zav did, that it meant that he felt in a way others did not. That when they said, "This is this." That he knew, "This is that." As in, "This is a cup." But he knowing it as, "This is half. Emptiness. That which is missing." Poet...was how he had come to grasp what his parents had...so he, with guileless innocence, had known at once, and now knows ever-increasingly to be true...what they had so badly misunderstood about Bad. Exactly, they had not, did not ("Could not"?) understand "intention" and "consequence" as he...mere boy that he still was...as he thought they had.
Unfortunately, the other self-styled "poet" in his class proved to be like his parents. Zav quickly distanced himself.
Intention and consequence he saw not like words but as images, like the image of the cup.
During his First Cauldron, all was cup.
Even before he entered the room...that room—which no boy could forget, would forget, but the description of which varied so widely from boy to boy that Zav often wondered if they had actually been in the same room...but this, he told himself upon the day of insight into poetic heart, was before he grasped the generating, artful power of collective imagining—that room where all the boys and girls met, totally naked: peeled. Thirty, if there had been a count. How hard his dick shot out was lost upon his mind because it had become his mind.
Within the last echo of the fourth strike on the sonorous bronze gong, all had begun. First, the dance—girls donning full-length gossamer robes dewed with specks of silvery pearl...shimmering, being water-falling upon smooth marble, so the girls danced enchantedly—enchanting, evoking, summoning...boys with simple azure stoles looped around their necks...becoming sky and clouds to the falling rain...a prancing and looping that was practiced during The Course—back then it was boys alone, girls alone...each step memorized, but here turning into what none could have foreseen, yet what each so achingly yearned for...a gracefulness of individuals who, dancing, become group and at the moment of grouping, disperse into communal imaginings.
Some quickly to the masks. Others whirling about under splendid capes—each having to be personally made, not borrowed, not bought—creating swirling themes of showers of flowers and bright, daring bolts of colored forms...globular was the dominant manifestation..but as to all this only the teachers took notes, jotted in their Observation Books.
Zav had selected a tie. Wide as his hand but as long as to cover his private parts...it was a serpent, poised, regal, ready not to strike but to draw attention, to fascinate—he chuckles as he puts it on...and it was the first responding chuckle which drew him over. She a shiny goddess all possessed by writhing streamlets of color painted upon her body, front and back: Alive! Pulsating. Seething! ...Darting eyes, these which were her beckoners, a mouth small and somewhat squished but which worked a tongue in coy tango, lassoing him with kisses...she wafts him towards her...hidden there her forked-tongue enthralla him, never giving him a moment to consider that she is now his first, not being his first embrace, but his first Grand Goddess, first Lover...so it was his to be, for the first time, a Grand God and a first Lover—meaning not Zav any longer, not a cock tied to a morsel of identifiable flesh, but a living, panting, growling, prowling, feverish-a-fire and mad imagining of sexual desire...in truth as in myth, he a First Male, she a First Female.
Lil: Did not know him.
Zav: Did not know her.
Jots in an Observation Booklet.
There was not space for all, so that room lost its anchor, its locus, its bearing...and to conjure the magic of imagining there were other rooms, innumerable, as there was time infinite.
Sometimes just four, never less.
Sometimes four and then four more.
Sometimes no way to count—as the goal of all their teaching, all that stirred in the Cauldron, came to a wondrous fruition...all feeling simply as
One—being not solitary but the One who is All.
Communal.
Cauldron—so aptly named, for they were melted down, refined, absorbed, purified, combined, brewed.
Not that there weren’t moments of un-imagining. As when raw vegetables are thrown into the pot, before they become stew.
Boys jostle boys.
Girls steal from girls.
There are grunts which threaten.
There are hisses which seek to claw.
But it doesn’t take long for imagining to effect the ascension.
Zav mounts the moon...accepts the invitation of the departing Lover and docks himself inside her. Presses hard, reflexively pumps in and out, slowly, finding as he does so that he has found him—the other who has just left, the many others who had been...it's like walking down a corridor observing niches with artful statues, so is he being imagined, not he imagining—this the communal epiphany, this the ascension.
Yet, so new at the First that he is unaware, has it not rise into a solid thought, only feels it, senses it as he swims into her, for it is this motion which overwhelms him... now, he swimming, not pumping, not shooting, not propelling from within him to outside and within her, not depositing...swimming—flowing as if a wave, a wave among waves, a wave coming more strongly to swelling wave, cresting wave, thundering orgasmic wave as she is beach, standing there as cloud waving from the beach, not at all a person, not he a person—More!—both as a presence...it is this swimming into presence—fully of her, fully of him—which is the ascension.
Between the First and the Second there was only a difference of intensity, not of kind. Each became more fluid, sharp, talented. "Flow. How do you flow?" which meant, How are you handling being here and being there, at the same time? Not so philosophically worded, more, as vaguely posed. Most answers were curt: "Good," "Okay," "Wavy!"
None except Zav...and he does believe that there are others: senses them...yet none who handle it in its true philosophical depth. But then, he is only soliloquizing.
The Third was no earlier than the eighteenth year. The Second just happened, without a precise accounting.
It was a time for technique as much as anything.
Athleticism abounded.
Artful displays consumed more time.
"A hundred ways for exciting...." fill in the blanks: fellatio, cunnilingus, bung-holing, nipple orgasm, finger-firking...it went on and on.
There was also some smugness about being ascended. Which required a refresher course or two to ensure that their charges did not stray too far from the necessary preparation for the Third.
"I’ll do it. But it’s crap!" Angry.
"You did the other things they told us. Was that crap?" A hint of exasperation.
"Yeah, okay..." as Mark slips on her brassiere, does so but can’t bend his arms around his back to fasten it.
She titters; almost tears. He is instantly pissed.
Before he can spit—"Here," she pulls the contraption (how Mark is describing it to himself) around and snaps it on backwards and then swirls it around, through his hairy armpits, "Voila!"
Firk!
"A little flat-chested..." but she can’t finish.
Mark grabs a skirt and stomps out of the bedroom.
Lil liked to dress up like her Dad when she was young. Even favored the male fashions into her teens, but she never made much of it to the others.
"Men’s clothes are so comfortable." Fully dressed. Casual style. Slacks. A jersey. Sockless loafers.
Zav had never even once ever thought about his Mother’s closet!
"C’mon here, Sweetie!" With a snap of the fingers, a whip of the wrist, and a nod of the head. He saunters over. "Get into this!"
Switcheroo!
"How many times do we have to do this?"
"Anyone know the date?"
Voice from a stall, "Two months." Said in that tone of "Two freaking stupid blasted months to go!"
Since they had trusted their teachers, especially the Master Teacher up to this point, who were they to complain or not comply?
Hadn’t each enjoyed all The Games and the two Cauldrons?
Who had found a Rule they really didn’t like?
"I’ll do it their way as long as I can also do it my way!"...Mark’s way of handling it.
When The Third came to be, each and all were surprised.
The boys in one room. The girls in another. At least this is what each group initially supposes.
Plainly dressed. Bland and uniform khaki. No style. No flare.
Each walks up to a microphone. Each responds to the same question.
"Who are you?"
Most cover as much ground as possible. Nervous that they are forgetting, missing that something which makes them special: charming. Caught off guard by the invisibility of their teachers. Add, the invisibility of the other gender, although each word is heard as each speaker is seen beyond the blind. Isolated. Individual. Personal. Not in the least comforted by the proximity of their own gender group—sitting in a straight row of folding chairs behind the one speaking.
"I am..." and it fades off into the dullness of idiosyncrasies and solitary pursuits.
"I am..." bounces and clunks as it reaches deep into the realm of each one's separteness, aloneness, isolatedness...harder to discuss or describe once having felt the collective "I"...the feeling of ascension, of being communal...which, here, in this exercise finds no delightful tongue.
Droning on; endlesslisting—"... playing Monopoly. Studying exobiological genetics. Building models of ancient gasoline cars." Individual. Specific. Dull. Dull. Dull.
Zav and Mark, Cilla and Lil—all fare as badly as their peers.
"Torture! Pure torture," Zav—not about his speech but on having to have listened to all the other speeches...of boys and girls.
The other three grimaced sympathetically.
("Charmed?")
Zav had snuck in just one cleverness—"I am who I am not." Glossed that with a quick rendition of the books he liked to read: "Archetypal Martian fables. Nephite archaeology. Flick-clips on Proto-Classical Thump and Wail..." and such.
A note was jotted in an Observation Booklet: Poet.
Another: Bad?
"Fluked, guy, I tell you, simply fluked."
Mark had nothing to add.
"We’ve still some Game time. How about picking up some Last Games Greenies?"
Both snicker, then toss down a thumb of hot sweating alky.
"Yeah. I’m pumping it, but it ain’t the same. You?"
"Haven’t seen Cilla in days. Make that weeks."
"Yeah, know what you mean. No firking!"
Firk!
Mark heard Zav out, was not surprised that he put him off, expecting him to understand since, like many others, now he was practicing self time. What some called this last three month period before their Twentieth. A time when they could ignore a glance, a come-hither, a dip of a bared shoulder...which the Greenies and youngers were supposed to understand but which most didn’t, especially the Greenies. However, few self-timers cared because there was so much juice flowing that, if they wanted, and when they wanted, it took but just another slight turn, another mere glance and they were off: Courting.
Self-time. "Who am I?" really knocked Zav about. I am who I am not.
Mark had said, "I’m me. Wonderful me. What you see is what you get!" Self-satisfyingly jointing it: "What you don’t see is what you don’t get!" Balance. It made him happy. It seemed to satisfy Cilla. Charmed her—his self-confidence, self-assuredness...even though her "Smoky Angel?" still unanswered, yet all rolling up into an thrilling charmfulness. She said, "You’re charming," before he charmed her with, "Likewise."
Without sound: Column A: "Not Charming." Column B: "Charming." Mark is in control!
Poetic beyond his own grasp, Zav had avoided sharing his musing on the question with Lil.
Yet, Zav had no doubts. "Lilith" would be the name on the Invitation. He had no doubts.<
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Haven’t seen Cilla in days. Make that weeks. The words raced through his whole body from toes to groin pounding up to heart and blasting into his brain. If his eyes could jiggle like slot-machines he would have wished them to so jiggle.
"Not Cilla. Lilith." Oh, how he had wanted to say that. Utter it in calm, cold, iron words. Words staked like Father-God Armstrong stabbing the moon with his flag-spear.
To Cilla. To Zav. "Especially to Zav!"
She couldn’t refuse him. There was no thought of refusing. Regardless of how the Third had changed things. He must’ve been there, before?!
Regardless of how the answer to Zav’s "Who are you?" was now confirmed as "Lilith." Regardless of how all knew that they needed to practice anew, practice "self time" and practice answering "Who am I?" by focusing upon, meditating with, and clarifying the uniqueness of the one with whom they would Couple.
They were not yet Twenty. All was still allowed.
More, it had to be. "Fate, once-again!"... unwhispered.
"No Rule broken!" ("Letter of the Law" in Column A. "Spirit of the Law" in Column B.)
("Bullshit!")
"Flow." Not a question. Not even a command. Just said to her as if lifting a slice of apple for her, Eat!
He didn’t seek Zav in her.
He didn’t explore with artful hands.
He didn’t swim, not imagining her as beach.
He didn’t seduce her, not a romantic whisper or gift.
"Nothing!"
Nothing she could do.
Too startled to feign pleasure at his coming.
He pushed himself into her.
He pushed her around on the floor.
He pressed himself as harshly as his might endowed.
He pressed and pushed himself into every entrance, came out every exit.
He squashed and mashed and squeezed and balled her up into his hands—pounded her round and threw her away!
("Live Long and Prosper!" thrills his every quark...conscious and unconscious.)
Lilith weeps.
Flesh sodden with his sweat—sweat of his flesh, thick spit of his seed, the sucking of his soul...sweating— she hears his resounding naming, his naming of her self..."You are nothing! Nothing!"
As shame was a word long forgotten—of the Dumb Faith—all she felt she could only describe as Bad... the Downward pull. Real Bad!
("Am I?"...Zav? Cilla? ...Am I?)
As trained, so she voiced the only answer anyone could proffer—"Do whatever you must!"
("No. Cilla, you are wrong! I do remember him!")
There are no jots about all this in any Observation Booklet.
PART 2: COUPLING