Proboscis

Nepal. Funny place I suppose. Little mountain climbers. Women who marry an entire family of brothers, haul their wood. That is what I know so far about that kind of place. I do know the exact opposite and in great detail. I've washed the hind end of a mutawaa, a wahhabi. You haven't lived until you've done that sort of thing only to have his monstrous Shoula Mall brother amble in the room and shout, "Witch! Burn the Witch!" That poor little man with a short thobe and a perfect crease down the center of his red and white gutra, had spinal cord cancer. The last time I saw him, he was struggling down the hall using a geriatric-stroke-walker, a trail of feces in his wake.

His brother on the other hand (must have had a different mother, certain kinds of differences can only be explained by that social setting) was over six feet tall and is what we can call, a fiery prophet type. The first time I ran into that SOB was at Shoula Shopping Center just off the old airport road, I had no head cover. The girls and I were in a pet shop (buying our lovely cat Rambo, a burglar of great renown we were soon to find out) and the boys were in the next shop looking at shoe horns or bow ties. The giant entered the pet shop so I cowered behind the mice rack and told one of the girls to run like the wind, no, faster, "Go next door and tell the boys to stay away." After all, it is the husband that will be arrested in Riyadh for the crime of sexually displaying his wife's golden locks in public. It took some pleading but the eight year old did what I told her to do. The boys came running in immediately, thinking I'd come to some great harm, perhaps I'd been bitten by a marmoset or something equally toothesome and vile. It was much worse than that. The giant had cops with him, the force. Much to my husband's dismay. He did the so-called right thing and assured the God Police that he'd buy me a hankie to cover my head right away. That was that guy. I saw him over and over and over in Riyadh, it was never pretty between me and him. And then, I washed his brother's ass in a shower for an entire week of twelve hour shifts. We were quite close so to speak.

But this is about butterflies and Nepal. When one reaches the top of the peaks, one is supposed to see roses and brocade. One does. One does see a proboscis on every flower.

******

Years later I was working in a very special capacity at the Specialist's Center. I was a specialist. A case manager. Case Management, the intimate workings of a plan and a prognosis, prophecy and clinical trickery. My reputation grew and grew until they seldom referred to me anymore as Sister but as Um-Ali our doctora. I was allowed to view the world of facial disfigurement. I was allowed to prophesize and collude with the Gods over Achilles and the Cyclops. I was, as you say, as a God. I was Hera to all the unfortunates in my path. I could make them appear as if by magic and give them lodging on the temple grounds if my spirit so willed. I could admit them to the Oracle visited once a month by all the powers that be, the invisible Gods and Godesses that answered to me, Um Ali. I could send them to their deaths as careless Gods sometimes do, and I did. I could snatch them from the Minotaur only to have them trampled by their own fathers. Like Tufla. Her name meant only, baby girl. Nothing more, just infant baby girl and she died that way, infant baby girl, starved.

Summoned one day to the room of a woman and child, I arrived to find that things were not going well at all. There was no love in the room. The air was as still as the space in a casket. In birth, someone had died. This living thing lying next to the madonna had no star shining overhead, no wise men in attendance nor any angel to smile lovingly down upon it. In days of yore, the days of midwifery, leeches and blood lettings, this would have been shoved under the bed to be thrown later into the steaming bog or sunk into the well. Ah, Jesus! It was swaddled within a suffocating hold of thermal blankets, struggling to breathe. The Madonna who sat upright in bed had a lonely pieta smile, a deadly smile like the Mona Lisa, a kind that shouldn't be taken for granted. She didn't speak.

Greetings and salutations I said. Hera the invisible greets those in the dark, those whose eyes are way-laid in the folds of their own misery in such a way.

No response. I walked to the other side to lift the babe from the rectangular glass box where she lay looking about in a kind of wonder that is notably: part blindness and part the instability of the new world. A pupa.

Two distinct clefts interupted her rosebud mouth. Her upper lip to my great honorific satisfaction, displayed one of the most beautiful probosci I'd ever seen! It curled around and up to join with the perfect sections of nare joined by a paper thin columnella. Mariposa. Frah'sha. She was, she was!

The Madonna stared forward, her nipples like stone.

*****

Zeus was summoned. Some mortals are unaware that Zeus is actually a seriously overweight Syrian plastic surgeon. Sometimes he has bad breath, sometimes he is less than congenial and he is always moral. A damned fine aesthetic type who attends major gatherings of gods and goddesses whose primary concern is Beauty. Not that damn poet Gibran-type of beauty, that cowardly interpretation of such, but a practical summation of the angulature which adequately represents the normal human face and sometimes, the lopsided nippleness of the few. There are even fewer who know or who would suggest that the Gods and Goddesses were coupling with their cousins to retain their rights of property management and gave birth to Cyclopses at frequent intervals, nothing more than mortal imposters playing vivid mind games.

Invisible Hera talked the pieta into trying a synthetic goat teet, and to concentrate on death and death particles. I had divined the consecutive losses of three other beings from the consanguinuity charts of the ancients recommending to the able bodied mortals that they let go of the pedantic mythologies of guilt and remorse. Over the course of immortal time (three to five days), the nymphette named Rose, or Zahra, was being gladly tossed about like a bag of hammers or oranges. There was joy and gratitude all around. I, Hera the invisible was invited to attend festivities in the military city of Kharj. One day yes, Rose would be able to marry a prince. Through the interventions of Zeus, her proboscus healed into the finest union of bud-bloom lips imaginable. There was no third eye or fourth tongue like some of the others. There was no six chambered heart, no dorv or truncus, the corpus collosum was an integrated whole of unanimous non confusion. She did not waste into a bag of bones like Tufla, the infant girl who had arrived to the Temple Mount hidden in a bundle of dirty scarves smelling like a dead rotten mule. No, she would return with her mortal parents season after season to offer the true good tidings of beauty to the Oracles and Ogres who lay around eating peeled grapes and sopping up date juice from the tidy corners of Utopia, waiting for Destiny to perform the chores that Destiny always performs. The ritual of mortal perversity which is revealed to the Elect yet is undecipherable to the shunning flocks. It is quite immeasurable, purity. Circuitous and boundary free. It tastes relatively good like ambrosia.

******

After working miracles in the boundary free avenues of the police-god-state, boundary free because there is no boundary to transgress in anonymity, a goddess is free to walk about unencumbered save for the diaphanous garb usually required in such boundary free states of being, sometimes even cloaking the leopard like face of solar transmutation from weary passers-by in the finest of tulle veils, I would entertain myself by visiting one of the many Temples of Divine Engagement there in the land where graves are marked by no stones. These reminded me of the fabulous constructions at one of our more well-known temples, the Jupiter or more widely known as the Dionysian of Baalbek. Our largest creation ever which still stands to this day as a symbol of Greek Devilishness and Debauchery. We've also had a bit to do with the Orlando in the New World. Imagery combined with belief and fascination, there is nothing quite like this to take a goddess out of her worry over the destiny of mortals. Nor is there anything like it to observe mortals in their elemental forms.

In that particular TDE, the ruler-god-imposters had set up a fine array of diversions and distractions: tree logs on which to ride which rushed through sparkling streams of crystal clear cold water; gigantic caterpillars and bumble bees sculpted of the finest polyurethane available; a variety of imbibements to assuage gluttony made of USDA and potato flakes; workers to attend to all the needs of the flock. Workers to scrape urinals, workers to sweep confetti, workers to change money into tokens of the imaginary realm, workers to open and close mysterious doors, workers to forbid the transgression of gender alliances which are forbidden in the forbiddenless state of mortality in the anti-mortal sphere. All of the workers were Nepalese, tiny and fine featured gentlemen with platonic smiles and eunuch shaped buttocks. Gentle fine helpers. One of the Nepalese eunuchs noticed me watching my mortal son who was riding upon a steed of great power and integrity, steaming nostrils and bi-partate hooves. He wanted to indulge the goddess whom he recognized from his own far off land of Nepal where he had once guided a group of the Elect through the bitterest snows of realization and enlightenment. This happened sometimes, the diaphanous garb was useless to hide the Elect from the Elect. So he continued to allow my mortal son to ride on his powerful steaming steed, immortal time breeched, the token of the realm indifferent to the pleasure of a goddess.

A voice interupted the fine and free pleasure we were having. It cursed and growled, a griffin most likely, I thought to myself. God-damned griffins! There is nothing to steal here except the time of the mortal son of a Goddess! Yet he cursed and berated the eunuch until the eunuch cried. The eunuch cried the cry of lost empires and lost hopes. He cried because of his fine intentions. He cried because he hadn't been paid by the royal proprietors in years. He cried to see my eyes through the garb and that I cried too, the cry of our god-ness. We weren't stealing from the griffin, we were giving to each other out of the infinity of time, a moment of pleasure in a pleasure bound land, one of ample grace, the land of the prophets and meteors, the land of Abraham and Moses, Hera and Zeus.

Rose's father spit at the foot of the eunuch. "Rose should ride first, stop that boy from riding!" I hid my face from the light of destiny, from the perpetuity of marrying a rose to a prince, the importance of that. Several roses to one prince and vice versa. My son disembarked from the steed as all silent princes do in the land of lost temples.

The eunuch turned his eyes as I did, to the snout of the giant polyurethane caterpillar. We praised the God of this imperfect beautiful world, our tears but only a few more in the sea of the giants.