CHAPTER 4
"Bad?" intrigued Mark.
Zav had proven to be a regular guy, a normal student: studied, drank, talked sports, bragged about women...the usual stuff.
Was it a joke?
"My ancestors—even parents—resisted The Ascendancy." Hesitantly, clarifying: "Somewhat."
Great Moroni’s Toot! Who says that in public? Even if it was three centuries ago?!
Shocked, but more like itchy with fascination—a paleontological discovery shock: knew it once existed but not today! "So...you don’t have sex?" Couldn’t stifle the incredulity...the amazement of the fact.
Zav’s head bobbed a bit: up and down, swayed sideways, quite tiny movements as if his head were on a spring; lips pursed. He hadn’t discussed this in years, not with Howie, not since Delantra back in high school..."No."
No? What kind of no? No I don’t. No I do? "What?" a calm inquiry; not trying to flush the quail, not ever having stalked quail before!
"No. Yes. I’m not a virgin if that’s all you’re asking." Snicker.
Zav had been washing the few glasses they possessed, all other implements being paper—to cook, to eat—glass being quite special, personal, not rare, but commonly not-used. Zav had told him: "Don’t like putting recycled crap sheets to my lips." Mark understood, but it never bothered him. He rather liked the glass, even if Howie had used it...Mark trusted sterilization.
Washing, now walking out of the room, moving in that way which told Mark, "That’s it."
What type of woman is Lil? She must know? No? Girls were trained to detect that, weren’t they?.. Mother! back home he’d been stoned, naw, just run out of town. Loaded. They would’ve locked up their daughters when he walked the streets! "Ship him off to the Sahara!" or something. Ha. Must’ve been some, after all Zav qualified to be a Public Menace.
Mark, as everyone his age, has been through "Courting for Beginners" or as they dubbed it, "The Course." He knew Bad to be the most trifling of terms while being the most damning. Playground kids bandied it about, teasing, while ignorant of its more foreboding overtones. A foreboding picked up in The Course where the matter was not directly approached, instead, where a teacher would toss off an image, a metaphor, a clunky phrase, all the time probing her troops searching for what? Everyone knew something was happening, something of import was being said, yet no one asked, "Teacher, what exactly do you mean by Bad?"
Mark—ever shrinking grand ideas down to digestible bits—cut and pasted notes and random thoughts in his digital ledger: "The Dumb Age. Hard to imagine, but pre-Ascendancy. People lived as if only themselves, not as Couple! Sexual savagery. No Rules. No Protocols. Male and female as Enemy. War of the Sexes. No self-control. No communal vision. Not yet an erotic cosmic vision. Not yet star-bound Parents. Not just deviants, but middle-class people, like your parents...most of you. Sex was not a matter of the soul!"
Although the lesson’s stress was on "not a matter of the soul," Mark underlined and circled the phrase "War of the Sexes." He could never get more details, but the phrase clanged a gong in his quite unmusical brain.
As happened more often than not, when lecturing on pre-Ascendancy years, more was left unsaid then said. Indeed, only a few would come to know more ("Only Deacons!"), absorb the full import of The Ascendancy as an intergalactic crisis of sex and spirituality. A moral crisis which was rooted in "Dumb Age" beliefs.
"Dumb Age" was another portentous phrase elusively grasped. A globe-swallowing moral crisis about which, for ages, scholars had written. Preachers had preached. Politicians had railed!
"Dumb" until the "New Truths." A premise of which was that there was no way to ground the practice of erotic healing in a Dumb creed which held the body to be Bad, and stated dogmatically that sexual embrace was the cause of a cataclysmic First Sin...and of most subsequent sins.
Bad Truths which were iron-collars—circular, self-imprisoning. Until the first Ascended voices proclaimed:
"Too much guilt," averred the appointed and revered Psychotherapist Laureate.
"Too much sin," averred the appointed and revered Preacher Laureate.
"Too much suffering," averred the appointed and revered Masseuse Laureate.
For the boys and girls, "The Course" which they broad-stroked as "The Bad Faith," although "Bad" was not expansively discussed nor reflected upon. Evil being a word only scholars used. "About all things Dumb, the less said, the better," was the perennial mentoring guidance given to all.
"What happened back then," stumbling for teaching words, bridging words, buffering words: hurting with alien, Dumb words, "was a regeneration which was effected by The Ascendancy, which is The Ascendancy ...that’s all you need to know. Believe it. Simply, don’t doubt."
Regeneration: not reform, not restoration, but the finding of a totally unique, virgin, untapped, mysterious seed, source—"Creation is you," is The First Truth now catechized.
"That’s about it!"—the pedagogical safety-bolt clangs shut.
Where and how Mark "really got it!" was upon hearing it all boiled down to what would become a highly memorized and oft repeated creedal brief of the New Truths—first memorized to pass the entrance exam for The Course:
"Sexual coupling is the creative starting point and moment. It is that embrace which links two bodies and positions them as foci on the spiritual ellipse. Once coupled, the mystery and reality of The Ascendancy occurs. Namely, that while remaining two, a new oneness, a new Presence emerges. It is an emergence which is birthing—the new birthing of two, already alive in time and space, as one, and as they uncouple, as never the same again. Pleasure is eternal, forever—soulful. To erotically embrace is to evoke ever-lasting presence."
Such truths were simplified in the "Ten Year Old Boy Translation ...simply, "Testosterone! Balls! Yippee!" It was the day, the moment, he began to look at girls—hook them, snare them with his mastering green eyes.
Mark could hardly wait till thirteen...when Courting begins!
Zav returns: "You want to know. Know this." Sits down on the couch. Mark gets up from the kitchen table, three-steps and sits down on the only other chair in their living room.
"My parents went half-way. Fixed my brother."
Mark’s mind is in silent commentary. Amazing!
"They’re like that. Whole family’s like that. Anyways, as they tell it. My grandparents for centuries back had done the same. An interminable line of old fashioned biologists! (Sigh.) Ones—although believers and Ascended, they did so part-way...hypothesized that the body might be somewhat Bad...thought the mind possibly separate from the body...that the Final Ascension could be purely mental evolution. Called themselves "agnostics." Body doubters. Were proud of it. Could be proud back then. So, they experimented. Wanted to see if there was a moral...what, how’d they say it?..."neuro-synapse"...something like that, a physical bridge. Whether if you dammed the body—meaning, no sex, whether the soul...if there was a distinct soul...whether it’d be changed. I had nothing to do with this, you understand."
"Ledgers. Like you’re a debit and your brother’s a credit." Mark was almost enthused.
"Sorta," somewhat miffed by the image: too stiff.
"Sorta. But it’s becomes a, um, how to say it? A mission. A secret family mission. There are others you know. Somehow they will contact me. So I’m told."
"But if no sex, how’d you get born?"
"No sex even while having sex." Casual.
("I’m a poet! Get it?")
"Bad!"
("Bullshit!")
Fixed. Mark remembers the day. Birthday boys, gleefully in their newborn birthday suits, embarrassed but, more, emboldened—"Hoist ‘em high!" was the bathroom howl.
Thirteenth. A handful of other guys were there. They all eyed each other with barely restrained drool, for from this day forward they could "Do it!" All it took was a painless—but ever famous "The Shot"—injection and a simple, fifteen minute procedure...not even anaesthetized.
Each was now "Courting." Each had
received his certificate, a graduate of "Courting for Beginners."
Each had manfully swelled and accepted the Mission issued by the teacher as he handed out completion certificates, "Love freely!"
The crowd cheered. Their parents hugged them. Younger brothers waited at home, eager to now step up to "Next in line!"
But more importantly—girls! Girls began to talk with them...naturally, girls thirteen and older, they who had also received their certificates, having heard in their separate room and time: "Do what you must!" girls...by yourself or with others, touch them, invite them "over."
"Roll me over in the clover!" The spicy chant of those "Gone a’Courting!"
"It’s easier than you think," Zav spoke, answering Mark’s unvoiced question. "There’s a fairly wide network of medicals who will forge Fixed paper." Pointing towards his room, "You can read my diploma." It was a pointing gesture without his head turned, but not without a whiff of mirthed laughter.
Diploma. "Show me," she said. Mark did. She undressed. It was like magic. "A passport to the realm of love. It’s magic," and the teacher, Mr. Oblonsky, had played an archaic, now legendary, Boy’s Tune, "It’s magic in a young man’s heart!" that hums in Mark’s mind till this moment, every time he readies for sex.
Mark believes Zav: "He’s Courting, that’s all I need to know." Trust. "Trust his bullshit!"
"Lil knows?"
"Maybe."
"Maybe?"
"We kid about it. When I first seduced her...believe me it was a romantic seduction! At the just right moment I whispered, "I’m Bad"—just to spike the mood. But she believed me, I think. Somehow." The tone was spiced with perplexity.
"Possibly, really, she doesn’t know?"
"Do you know?"
Jokester?