Luminous Ecstasies and Passions: Journeys into Afterlife

CHAPTER 1

Gasping and moaning her utter abandon and sensual delight, Amber Sterling’s naked, firm, lean body gyrated on the bed. Then, she lay still for a quiet moment, glowing like an alabaster Aphrodite in the muted shafts of early evening light. It was the volcanic quiescence preceding the final outburst of storms of frenzied ecstasy. She gripped Bob, above the shoulders, firmly in the clamp of her strong, tender thighs. He gently explored, with tenuous, tender tactility, softly but hotly. Sinuously penetrating and subtly exiting, he inflamed her emblazoned heart. She flailed wildly and shifted her hips, screaming and grasping the copper bars of the headboard behind her, hissing with luminous ecstasy and passion, searing with explosive release.

Bob had never loved her so deeply as at these moments, feeling her electricity, the fierceness of her muscles, and the thrill of her intensity and excited exuberance. Suddenly, the energy stilled again for another expectant moment, as the cosmos seemed to hold its breath in anticipation.

Then she exploded with a shout and cry in all her force and fury. She burst into psychic incandescence, as if the blazing sun had gone nova, and a hundred thousand choirs had crescendoed together. Her rapture and ecstasy seemed to rip the very heavens asunder. The world rocked, the earth tilted. Her stunning orgasm thundered through every fiber of her being, electrifying the room. Amber imploded into a nucleus of pure, boiling, sizzling luminosity at the axis of her soul. Her psyche exploded in dazzling interior pyrotechnics, as she was kissed by Bob, and by the cool lightfires of heaven. She stared into the blazing eyes of gentle Love and touched the shining face of God. Subtle but strong electric forces traced like lightning along the fibers of her nerves, igniting soul and body with Love.

Fifty minutes later, her soulmind still shone like neon in soft luminescent afterglow. She floated tranquilly on brilliant, light-kissed clouds of serenity. Her exquisite pleasure amplified by billions, and grew exponential and bottomless. Human love grew like wildflowers of smoke-light into cosmic fervor. The all-consuming, relentless pleasure became absorbing, galactic. It consumed her in the sweet soft wetness of warm dark skies and blazing points of starshine. Her soul was on fire with sweetness and pristinity, aglow with luminous ecstasies and passions of unmixed Love. The warm currents of dazzling darkness and shining fire-ice washed her away into oblivion/eternity. She was reborn in torrential, cyclonic Love. As they kissed, human Love blossomed into cosmic Love.

A volcanic eruption of utter bliss shook her body like a flag in raging wind, and she could no longer hold in the power of her marvelous laughter. It pealed forth in bell-like chimes of the most dulcet tones of sheer, naked release and freedom, blending harmoniously with the chimes outside in the breeze, creating the purest music of Tao. Her soul soared on its soft, shimmering wings. Bob eagerly, immediately joined her. It was the laughter of innocents, of shouting their joy at being alive, of a spontaneous dance of celebration. Bob Sterling blended and chimed his breath with hers, and felt their hearts beating in rhythmic harmony. Amber’s and Bob’s bodies sang, celebrating the beauty of God revealed in nature. They both lay panting, with luminous passions of holiness shining in their eyes and gleaming in the sacred sweat glistening on their bodies.

For them, sex was a delightful, pleasure-filled extension of nature which was an expression of divine Mind. Sex with Love was an act of worship, an elevated and noble sharing of the most spiritual communion, expressing deep, mutual love and lasting commitment. Anything less cheapened and trivialized sex. Bob Sterling was, indeed, every bit as sexual as Jeffrey Griffin, the unhealthy sex-obsessed elder-leader of the Preachers of God, the cult which Bob was now studying in preparation for his new book—an expose of cult-dishonesty.

But Bob’s sexuality contained an innocence, a wholesomeness, a naturalness, that was completely lacking in the secret, defiled world of Griffin’s lurid sexuality. Griffin’s sex was all dark and dirty alleys and unclean, shameful furtiveness, but Bob’s sex was the rising of the sun on a field of flowers, a splashing, sun-kissed waterfall in springtime. Griffin’s sex was a supernatural forbidden demon of evil, but Bob’s was a gift of God, bright, natural, and unashamed. Sex made Griffin feel guilty and filthy, but it made Bob feel clean, new, whole, and blessed, glad and thrilled to be alive.

For Bob and Amber, all goodness and love converged in concentrated form in sexual sharing. Sex was worship more valid than kneeling at an altar, and was as holy. Bob liked to say, Every act of Love is an act of worship, and Amber happily agreed. Thus, their most luminous ecstasies and passions opened the gates of inner heaven, turning them on to maximum Love. They gave each other the most powerful transfusions of purest, pristine love—as vital to their lives as blood.

Now, an hour after her pleasure-infusion had peaked, Amber gently turned Bob over onto his back. Then, she was on top of him, kissing with gentle warmth and hot passion, working her way downward from his face and chest. Bob was always astonished by her inner and outer beauty, but never more so than when she glowed with softly ferocious, hungry, pristine passion burning in her soft shiny eyes. He called her his Venus-Aphrodite, for she was a goddess of love, an archetype of the sensual and feminine, and an embodiment of sexual passionate beauty. Bob watched her in most delicious anticipation, knowing that his part of their shared ecstatic journey had only just begun.

CHAPTER 2

Stark snow bleached the silent landscape, a full moon poured silver over cream, and the entire world glowed in swimming, dazzling seas of opalescent brilliance against the backdrop of the inky star-peppered void. It was the most silent and holiest of nights, that night, in Worthville, Kentucky—a small afterthought village, whose population, on a good day, reached a staggering four hundred. The temperature, during the coming frigid day, would climb all the way to a brisk thirty-two—just bone-chilling enough to transform dull brown puddles into beautiful ice-crystals.

Bob Sterling rose from the bed and regarded Amber with deep appreciation. She was drifting in moonlight into the sweet spent warmth of dreamtime, and pulled the sheet closer to her nude form. Bob watched, reaching down and softly patting her butt. All the world outside now shimmered into a fuzzy theoretical construct in Bob’s mind, as his Love for Amber now rose and expanded to fill his entire field of consciousness. It loomed overwhelmingly sweet in his psyche, eclipsing, blotting out, and neutralizing everything but that wondrous Love.

In her own mind, she floated and wandered into an easy and joy-filled sleep. Bob smiled, visualizing her serene dreams. In the dream-state, she often played with a small bear, kitten, pup, or bird; all of nature found its comfort in her astral form and its embrace. She was the kind of woman who could give the world a hug, and really mean it. She was guileless, enlightened innocence embodied.

Despite her sophistication and exotic knowledge (for she was a natural mystic), she allowed herself to be a simple woman—not limited, but delightfully uncluttered. She possessed one of the most lucid minds that Bob had ever known, made more luminous by her tender concern. The diamond jewel of her beauty and clarity was always enfolded in the flowering petals of the softest blue lotus of her humility and tenderness. Her heart was often that of a gentle little girl, blossoming with overflowing love, and that thought made Bob sigh and smile. They had been sharing dreams, sighs, and smiles for twenty-nine years. Admiring once again her form, Bob reflected that she was amazingly grace-full, full of grace and charm. In her delicate lightness, she brought to his mind a white dove floating effortlessly in the bright sun. He called her his karma yogini—a phrase that meant that she had found spiritual awakening through acts of practical love and service. This endearment was only one of a series of partially secret pet-names which he called her in his heart: He also thought of her as his baby girl, his chula (from the Spanish for cute), Kami, Burria, Batira, Mari, and a dozen other equally non-sensical names of warm fondness, most based on cartoonoid personalities which they used to play with each other.

Bob thought wistfully of all the times, through all the years, that his sweet Amber had been there for him, to catch him as he fell, to talk him back to life, to save his soul from agonizing hells and utter ruin. A tear came to his eye. She was the rarest kind of being in the world—a triple Pisces, a natural mystic, at home in the world, at peace with the universe.

And Bob had no doubt that she was his soul-mate. They had been together, he thought, for centuries, and she had always been a peaceful warrior standing by his side on the battle-fields of life. She was pure indestructible diamond wrapped in the silken petals of a lotus.

In his mind, he saw the two of them near a lagoon somewhere in southern China, where they shared a life of bottomless serenity and still quietude. On a small table in their hut, Bob, whose name was then Li Cha, had spread some lemon-yellow parchment. He recalled having taken a slender brush from a few on the table. He then had dipped it in bright crimson ink, and delicately danced with brush and fingers over the paper, leaving behind the bright pictographic characters of the Chinese classic, Tao Te Ching. He would then, when finished, bind a number of these sheets together in a bright blue vellum, and sell them to rich clients, including governors. Or, at times, he would donate one of these gorgeous manuscripts to a beloved priest or temple. Bob emerged from this reverie and opened his eyes, wondering whether any copies of those ancient manuscripts still existed in the twenty first century. If they did, they would be worth a king’s ransom. As Li Cha he had also bound and painted bamboo furniture, made from his own plants, and Kam-I—now Amber—had been his constant unwavering companion. He had been her entire universe in those simple days, and she his. It had been quite a magical, mystical life of immeasurable tranquillity. Bob peacefully closed his eyes, and floated back again in mind-time.

CHAPTER 3

Bob allowed his mind to drift, back through the years, to another life, another time. He caught a vision of a wide open plain in the Western U.S. He breathed in the fresh breezes under the infinite turquoise sky of unlimited freedom. He lived a life of utter simplicity as a native American shaman; he owned nothing, and nothing owned him. The horse he now rode flew, like the wind, carrying him over the wide open plains, igniting fire in his sapphire eyes, and blowing his long brown hair behind him. His name was Shining Sky, and he was a Cherokee shaman—a dreamer for his tribe. His job was to dream, and then, to interpret the night-messages for the good of the tribe. This yielded much invaluable guidance.

In those mid-eighteen hundreds, Amber had been born into the wild west as Rebekkah. Again, Bob, beneath closed lids, recalled a scene: He had ridden his horse into the old town called Mesa Flats in Arizona, which had experienced a minor miner boom and then settled down to devolve into a dusty ghost-town. All that had been left was a general store, and it was there that Shining Sky met Tex—Rebekkah’s sleazy drunkard of a husband.

As Shining Sky rode up, he saw Tex strike Rebekkah. Quickly he leaped from his horse, and grabbed the man’s fist as it was about to slam into her head again. He then gave the offending arm a quick twist. The old guy yelped, more out of surprise and indignation than pain.

Tex stared blearily through unclear drunken eyes. What the hell you think you’re doin’, damn injun? and he turned his fury now on the native American. He swung his other fist clumsily, and Shining Sky easily ducked the blow. Tex lost his balance and came crashing down on the wooden planks, raising a small dust-cloud, with all the grace of a bag of sand.

Tex had a gun strapped to his belt, and he now grabbed it menacingly and rose, standing unsteadily. You fucker, he screamed. I’ll blow your balls off!

Shining Sky knew that Tex was too drunk to be able to hit the side of the proverbial barn, but still he did not enjoy looking down the barrel of that gun. So, he instantly kicked the gun from the man’s hand, and it fired as it jerked loose from his fingers. Shining Sky then did a round-house kick and placed a foot thuddingly deep into Tex’s chest. The geezer went flying off the porch backwards, yelling comedically.

Thanks, Mister, said Rebekkah softly.

You are most welcome, ma’am. Is he your husband?

She nodded silently. ‘fraid so, she said, quietly as dust settling. Her voice was dry and cracked from crying.

Shining Sky approached her until they stood about a foot apart. He looked deeply into her troubled eyes, and felt the luminous ecstasies and passions of love ignite his heart, as he reached up and wiped away a tear—one of billions that he knew that she had shed. As steadily as he could manage through his strong feelings, he said, Why do you stay with him?

Don’t have nowhere else to go, I guess, she said.

I’m sorry, he said. Truly sorry. Would you like me to take you to your house?

She saw Tex lying in an unceremonious heap near the porch, like the heap of garbage that she knew him to be. Don’t look like he’s goin’ nowhere, she said, and smiled uncertainly. It was a surprisingly dazzling and luminous smile, and Shining Sky’s heart skipped a beat. But a split-second later its promise of joy had evaporated.

I agree, said Shining Sky, smiling broadly and happily. Jumping up onto his bare-back horse, he extended a hand and helped her climb up behind him, and they rode off together.

That began a friendship that lasted the rest of their lives, Bob remembered, and then that evolved into something so much, much more. During that life, in the nineteenth-century, and others, Bob knew that he and Amber had shared the most electrifying, passionate, and luminous love-bonds—the sources of his greatest joys. His love for Amber had become an infinite interior fountain of dazzling light that cleansed and sustained them both, a luminous ecstasy and passion. It was a work of art, which it had taken centuries to paint, and they were still adding new brush-strokes every day. He hungered for her and lusted after her. He craved her heart, her body, and her soul. After so many centuries, they were bound at the juncture-nexus of every micropsychon in their shared souls. This Love was so exhilarating and sweet that it was his truest vision of God.

Bob returned in mind to the present. What were the chances, considering the infinity of both time and space, that they would end up together here in this tiny home, in the microscopic community of Worthville, Kentucky, on this nanodot of a world, this dust-speck called earth, zipping around a minispark in a minor arm of a minor galaxy? That blew Bob’s mind, but he was filled with gratitude that the immeasurable power of Love had magnetically drawn them together again in the twenty-first century. That very Love which sustains all creation had wrested their intergalactic souls from the immensities of bottomless space, and once again moved them into magnetic soul-fusion on earth.

Bob studied Amber, tears forming in his eyes, as she lay on the bed. He was filled to bursting with a love so deeply exquisite that it wove itself subtly into every fiber of the tapestry of his neural structure, sustaining and healing him.

I’m going into the office to ‘computype’ a while, he whispered, using an Aquarian neologism, just in case she was still awake.

She was, and she sat up in the bed, opening her eyes and regarding him with an expression of his own immeasurable Love. They kissed tenderly and long. Oh, you are my crazy hoot-owl, she said, smiling. That was her pet-name for Bob whenever he stayed up late. He smiled back. Don’t stay up all night, you nutty little elephant, She said. This other pet-name she used with gentleness and grace that reflected their love of the great trunked pachydermic mammals.

She not only used my elephant as a pet-name for Bob, but had even named this imaginary creature. Four years ago, they had read in Fate magazine of a real elephant who lived in the Ukraine, and who had managed to reproduce some human speech—ostensibly Ukrainian. His name was Batir (Bah-teer’) and he could say, Batir is good. So, from time to time, she also called Bob Batir, especially when they wanted to share a laugh, or when Bob displayed all the grace of a bull in a crystal-shop. The pet-name was devoid of all animosity. It was an uplifting game that prevented them from sliding into a real argument. It helped to diffuse the anxiogenic situations that so often spell the downfall of a marriage. For example, when Bob got peanut-bits all over the floor from a candy apple, or crumbs from crackers all over his shirt, Amber would, with good humor, frustratedly call out the name Batir! They both knew that this meant something like, I know that you are doing your best, but can’t you do just a little better? It was, in fact, one of the great secrets of their successful love that they played a number of such games.

For example, they created personalities of short-tempered, bossy camels to represent what would otherwise have been controlling inner parents. And they had two little doggie personalities to represent what could have been disastrously immature inner children in their real personalities. These continuously, jokingly, interacted. It all helped to maintain a nice homeostasis amidst life’s hurricanes.

Bob tip-toed slowly out of the bedroom, which he had nick-named the Goddess room, in honor of Amber, and made his way to his little office. It was a room that they also called the Crystallarium for, when they had first constructed it, it had been a room in which Bob had stored the many specimens of his collection of quartz, including amethyst, aventurine, and citrine crystals. (The Goddess room was the only square room in his house. For the rest of his home consisted of four small domes, two pentagons and two hexagons. The pentagons were smaller, and were their exercise-room and office. The two hexagons served as their living-room and bath-laundry. The complex was connected by two small hallways, so that the total structure assumed a rough crescent-shape. This he called his Aquarian home.)

In his astrochart, he had an energy of personality called Venus in Aquarius, indicating that, despite the fact that he was a sun-sign Pisces, he often lived also out of Aquarian energy. This meant that he regularly generated unorthodox and unconventional life-patterns. Shing Tzu, the old man whom he had befriended and adopted as his mentor, an accomplished astrologer, said that Bob was tough and determined because of his Taurus moon, a literate speaker with Libra rising, intense with Mars in Scorpio, and irrepressible with Jupiter in Aries. These all represented proclivities in Bob’s personality.

That night, he quietly traversed the hallway, whose glossy yellow wall was covered with stylized elephants of various colors—red, pink, purple, yellow, gold, and blue—and entered his little five-sided office. Its walls were painted a bright yellow called luminous gold. The office also held a small fountain, and three wind-chimes to stir up the energy periodically, as recommended by feng shui, the ancient Chinese art of energy-design. On the walls, Amber had painted brightly-colored goldfish, butterflies, and turtles—also natural feng shui symbols, designed to increase and purify energy.

He sat to type, the key-board on his lap, and began his new book. Its subject was cult-psychology, and now he allowed his mind to drift back to the early seventies, when he had joined his first cult.

CHAPTER 4

The severely loud banging of the tambourine now startled his mind, as he flashed back. The sound ubiquitously accompanied the mindless chanting of the Peacemakers of God. It drew him irresistibly back to his last day in the compound which they had named the Nirvana Ashram.

He had been granted entrance into the room called the Holy of Holies to speak directly with the Master, the Guru Avatarananda.

With crystal clarity, he remembered now how he had approached the guru silently, waiting for God to speak through the master. The guru, Bob now realized with a start, but with the clarity of retrospect, had been the most bitter-looking man Bob had ever seen; he appeared to be sick of life, weary with everything, bored to a point that made him repelled and repellant. He had a face precisely like those Bob had seen at the zoo on barracudas and piranhas. Fleshy, leathery dark brown jowls fell down morosely around a bitter little thick-lipped mouth, and the eyes were sunken and terribly dead. Like those of his followers, his mahogany head was bald—an affectation on which he insisted, possibly because he had been himself stripped bald by the ravages of old age, and so insisted that others look just like him.

If this guy had been any indication, Bob now thought, being God was not at all what it was cracked up to be. It was light-years from anything even resembling fun. This repugnant little guy claimed to be the only God fully incarnate. But, if he were God, Bob found himself thinking even back then, he surely was insecure.

For the guru continuously bragged about himself, and drew attention to himself. He went so far as even to distribute photos of himself to people to place on altars to speed up their enlightenment. Bob now saw this as sickeningly pathetic. The guru also made it a point to stand out, whenever and however possible. And in his grubbing for publicity, morality evaporated. He lied to his naive followers that he was above ordinary morality, as a living god. The truth was, Bob now knew, he was a pathological self-serving beast, a liar without a trace of ethics.

Unlike his followers, he was always, as now in Bob’s vivid dream-memory, surrounded by five lovely young girls; they were his absolute property, according to him, and jumped at his every whim. He saw to it that they were freshly rotated on a regular basis, guaranteeing him plenty of variety in his predatory lust. They served even as his sexual slaves.

There is a universal pattern, Bob thought, among religious fanatics: They are almost always obsessive, and often viciously greedy, about sex. This was just another face of their virulent mental illness, Bob realized. Psychologists recognized the Messianic personality of the guru as sick, twisted, and distorted. Sociologists explained that the bestowal of unlimited power on a man wounds and crushes his finer, nobler qualities, and magnifies the disease of his baser nature. Metaphysicians pointed out that the energy that could be channeled towards God is the same thing as sexual energy. And astrologers often ascribed the entire complex to the presence of the sign Scorpio, which provides an energy of spiritual depth, but which if not carefully regulated and sublimated, can emerge naturally as sexual. Or, they ascribed outrageous behavior to Libra or Pisces, which allowed one to be swayed by others, or to be lost in fantasies. Bob concluded, a touch cynically, that there were probably damn’ near as many explanations as explainers for why gurus act like such lame-brains and goof-balls.

Bob knew, at any rate, that Guru Avatarananda had been a sexomaniac. Bob now had the clearest recollection, a memory so bright that it almost literally appeared on the screen of his mind. It was a most sacred event, called darshan, or a holy audience with a guru. Even during this special time, Avatarananda did not hesitate to fondle the breast of one of his lovely young servants. His frenetic pursuit of sex, however, could do nothing to quench the smoldering ennui that all but consumed the man. It struck Bob that one of the most real forms of damnation was to suffer from the curse of the gurus: endless boredom, arising from total power.

Your holy grace, Bob said, in a memorized formula, I come before the guru for the bestowal of enlightenment. According to the superstition promoted by the guru, his very touch was sufficient to bring about instant enlightenment. One of the girls held his feet and lovingly, gently massaged them. Two others rubbed his legs and abdomen; and upon the breast of another he rested his head. Another stood by attentively and intently, lest her services be needed; she was the go for.

It was well known in the community that the guru was sexually sick, but no one ever admitted it. He had outgrown normal sex millennia ago, it was rationalized, and now sought to have supersex with multiple partners simultaneously, as a manifestation of his higher, evolved consciousness. As always occurs, however, this sexual ferocity took on a life of its own, and became all-consuming, driving the guru to ultimate madness. The guru ordered young couples to have sex in front of him and the loyal ones abdicated reason and modesty, and concurred, obeying this man who called himself the latest incarnation of Jesus, the Buddha, St. Francis, Merlin, King Solomon, and many other luminaries.

Sometimes, he would masturbate while watching the young couples. Or, he would demand that two of his female followers have sex, before he, like a zombie on automatic, joined in the party. But usually, he became so bored so quickly that he just stared stupidly and vacuously, almost completely uninterested. When he first began his degrading glide down the slippery slide of endless and immoral sexual insatiability, he would tell the girl that he was God, the very incarnation of love, and that to make love with him would eliminate all her karma and guarantee a rebirth into a paradise world. The silly and stupid girls attracted to the cult swallowed eagerly this line of bullshit, and complied, and obeyed the most twisted, most perverted orders and demented demands of the guru. And he demanded new fodder for his voracious appetites. Every night, a pretty young girl who had never been in his palace would inevitably appear. Since there were ten thousand sanyassins or guru-disciples, a vast majority of whom were young, vulnerable, inexperienced females (and sometimes he insisted on even virgins, leading him to abuse ten-and twelve-year olds) the supply was all but unlimited. The girls were sworn to a vow of holy silence after they had had sex with the monster. A few broke these vows, and some later wrote scathing exposes, although they were warned of several incarnations in hell for having done so. But when the word of his perversions and promiscuities began to leak out, and then, the cult began to come apart at the seams.

That was precisely, in fact, what had brought Bob before him this night. Guru Avatarananda, he said respectfully, I have heard many rumors, most of them quite unfounded and even ridiculous, about your having taken advantage of girls. Bob felt embarrassed, both because of the subject, and because here, among the four girls now rubbing various parts of the guru’s body, he was simply stating the obvious. I seek clarity. For you have taught us, and taught us well, Bob knew that it was always a bit of good insurance to throw in a little flattery, that we are to be sexually pure. Gullible girls with great asses notwithstanding, he thought.

That is correct, said the guru lazily, as if he had just awakened from a deep sleep. He always talked like that, as if nothing in the cosmos could he possibly find the least bit stimulating. Followers stupidly admired this as a sign of his transcendence. He had outgrown the things of this world, they whispered; but paradoxically these were the same ones who also gossiped about his sexual antics.

Bob’s memory now replayed the conversation again: I have taught you, he continued slowly, that you are not yet prepared for the high spirituality that can be obtained by the highest sexual union. You are too immature, and that is why God has motivated me kindly to provide my services to select companions for you, my children. In other words, the guru said who could, and should, sleep with whom. This, despite the fact that some of the sanyassins, including Bob, were married. So, when Bob was told to sleep with a beautiful young woman named Shakti, whose real name was Susan, he at last bucked the system and rebelled. The guru had gone into a rage upon hearing of the problem and had called Bob into this audience. Bob was idealistic—he now said, simple-minded—enough to hope for some special blessings of joy from this important meeting with the master. But actually being in the presence of the master monster made Bob’s flesh crawl.

Still, he managed to mouth the polite and respectful formulas, though he gritted his teeth: I thank you, holy father, for all your blessed activities of God for us, your children, said Bob mechanically, repeating one of the many formulaic addresses that all members of the cult were obligated to learn. But God has endowed all creatures with conscience. What is a person to do when conscience says one thing and guru says another?

The conscience must be trained, the guru answered, regarding Bob as if he were a butterfly specimen pinned dead to a board. It can also be trained wrongly. The conscience is often trained by religion, with all its hang-ups. The guru is beyond those hang-ups, beyond those laws. He who would know freedom must obey guru rather than his own poorly trained conscience. The guru turned away from Bob, opened his sash, and one of the girls began to cover his chest and belly with tender kisses.

The go for rushed up to Bob, grabbed his arm, and whispered urgently, Guru is finished, and you must now leave. Even back then, the little pretension of using Guru as if it were a name annoyed his sensibilities.

But I haven’t got a chance to ask  . . . Bob began.

She regarded him with stern authority in what might otherwise have been lovely blue eyes. It is time for you to go. It does not matter what your ego wants. You need to work on humility and obedience, brother. She forcefully pushed Bob towards the door, but before he left, Bob saw another girl kissing the guru’s belly. That was the day that he walked out of the Peacemakers of God cult forever, and returned to Amber, the love of his life.

He started, as if suddenly remembering that he was in the present, in his office. It was getting late, he realized, and headed for the bedroom, where he plunged into grateful and deep dreamless sleep, cuddling the warm, nude Amber by his side.

The next day, as he sat in his recliner, he continued his contemplation and review of the mess with the Peacemakers-cult. Amber sat on the love-seat reading a book. She looked up. You were thinking about the time spent with the Peacemakers, weren’t you? Bob was always startled by her intuition, which bordered on telepathy. He regarded her through tender, grateful eyes as the sun shone on her, and heaved a sigh of relief that he had broken free from the nutty, lame-brained cult, whose guru could not have found his ass with both hands in bright daylight.

Yes, he sighed.

And do you remember the time with the Mormons? she asked. He nodded his head dismally; she was not really going to let him forget his cult-experiences, and he felt grateful rather than resentful as his mind drifted back to a time spent with a Mormon elder.

CHAPTER 5

The trunk of an elephant reached startlingly out of Bob’s mind and into his face so realistically that he actually ducked in his recliner. To say that his memory was vivid was a remarkable specimen of ultra-understatement, a damnation by faint praise. For it was dazzling, a thing of absolute crystalline clarity, as lucid and bright as the most vivid film, as explosively beautiful and dynamic as a laser-light show. Now, he recalled the time that he had gone to the zoo with a Mormon elder; it had been spring, about twenty years ago, and he remembered having reached into a radically over-sized bag of salted, still in-the-shell peanuts, for which he had paid, in a version of highway robbery, a few dollars, and stuffing one of the nuts into the grasping, probing, curious elephantine appendage. Here, Sister Elephant, he said, have a two-dollar peanut. Enjoy, he said, stuffing her reaching trunk with a few more.

He addressed the great creature with healthy humor, and was delighted to see a smile in her understanding eyes. He had read where an elephant’s brain weighed thirteen pounds, while the human model weighed only a pitiable three. He also knew that the memory-section of the giant brain was extraordinarily developed, justifying the common wisdom that the elephant never forgets. As quickly as the great creature had snatched the nuts and tucked them into her mouth, the grasping trunk was again back in Bob’s face. One at a time, Bob fed the hungry giant, until he had exhausted fully half the nuts in the bag. Don’t you want me to save some for Brother Giraffe? He looked into the great poignant eyes, and seemed to sense a mischievous smile in them. No, I want them all, the beautiful female, whose name was Mai Tai, seemed to be saying, with a glint and glitter in her eyes.

Having fun? asked the Mormon elder who had accompanied him. The voice cracked with an aridity matched only by its frostiness. He was an old and diminutive man, with sparse, military-cut grey hair and steely blue eyes, almost as dead as those of the former guru. Also, Bob knew, this man had absolutely no interest in Bob’s fun-level.

The guy wore a frozen formal smile, but it was only a contrived curvature of tissue, and contained no mirth, no joy. Bob thought, he’s just baring his teeth, because his eyes did not smile. For this guy, it seemed, a smile was an anatomical, not a psychological, exercise. His joyless grin reminded Bob uncomfortably of a death-mask.

Yeah, I’m having a great time—more fun than humanly possible! mocked Bob lightly, suspicious. For the Mormon elder had invited Bob on this trip to the zoo—a most atypical act for an elder, especially this one. Why had Ray Clifford brought him here today? Bob was using his mind to probe, like an elephant’s psychic trunk, for an ulterior motive.

It was not long in coming. You know, said Ray, stiffly imitating what Bob thought must have been an attempt at friendly openness, I invited you here today to do more than feed the animals. There was a touch of disapproval, not very subtle, in the words, as if Ray really wanted to say the words that Bob heard only in his mind: Why are you fucking around feeding the stupid elephant? How can you have so much fun? How dare you leave me out, and ignore me, to pay attention to a dumb elephant? Don’t you know that I am a representative of God?

Bob responded, also in his mind, Yeah, sure, but the elephant is a hell of a lot more fun. I see more of God in her. But he actually said nothing.

And Ray also said none of this; Bob simply picked it up telepathically.

Bob was a natural sensitive and had even been told that he was gifted. He seemed at odd times to discern motives and attitudes beneath the surface. But how much was true empathy, and how much imagination, he could never say. He often thought of the process as empathimagination. To take it all as accurate telepathy, he warned himself, could create paranoia. For to take his gift too seriously, or to regard it as infallible, would land him smack in the middle of a rubber room. But it would be equally de-stabilizing simple to ignore his gift.

And at times, such as on this beautiful warm day, feelings seemed to be autonomous of Bob’s imagination. Let’s walk a little bit, said Ray, and Bob heard, and get you out of your idiotic obsession with that stupid elephant. Bob was a great lover of earth’s diversity of creatures and found the elephant the most darling and charming of them all. Some of his friends jokingly called him the elephant man, for he collected figurines of the great gentle giants, and had elephants made of jade, rose quartz, crystal—altogether, a collection of nearly thirty. He also had a wall in his office covered with stylized pachyderms. He enjoyed saying, Some of my best friends are elephants, especially since he had formed a personal bond with Mai Tai, the one at the Cincinnati Zoo.

Bob found this particular elephant unusually attractive and pleasant—especially if he contrasted it with his human company. But what was eating Ray about that? Was he so insecure that he saw the elephant as a rival? Bob shook his head in amazed wonder. Could a human being have such low self-esteem, as to be threatened by another species? Perhaps. Especially when that species was clearly better company. That would explain much of Ray’s odd behavior and bitterness.

I’ve still got some peanuts left, said Bob. Maybe we can go feed the giraffes.

Ray nodded rather somberly. What do I have to do to get your attention, anyway? Grow a monstrously long nose, or an equally absurd neck? Bob heard him say, but it was all in Bob’s mind. Bob’s mind was unusually elastic and impressionable. It was also extremely abstract, some would say spiritual. He spent much time lost in introspection. And like a child or dreamer—he was both—he was often challenged to distinguish reality from the contents of mind. It was a Pisces-challenge. He saw life as a delicious blend of inner senses of love and beauty, dancing with outer stimuli, creating harmony.

A little girl, about two years old, let out an ear-shattering squall. Her young mother looked around, embarrassed, and shushed the tot. But she would not be silenced. Ray approached her tentatively and said gruffly, Cute little girl. Could you get her to shut up?

The mother eyed him warily, and backed away from him, pulling the little girl’s stroller after her. The kid wailed once again, releasing a mind-splitting holler.

She’s thirsty, said Bob, and the mother began to fumble in a