Friday, June 20, 2008

Magdala is in Ethiopia; and Mary is a Fraud

There was no doubt in Terry's mind. None whatsoever. He had a gift. Or The Gift. He was different. And God had organized all of it, long before Terry had even been born, he was convinced. And he knew the whole story, all of it, which he had dreamed and pieced together from the codes, all sorts of codes, some of which God had formed in the remaining bits of cereal in the milk in his cereal bowl, when Terry still actually had a cereal bowl. And there had been other ways, more subtle ways, which had accumulated to make Terry the possessor of everything anyone would ever want to know about what made Ethiopia so darn special, along with the Freemasons, the coming Washington floods, which people would call Katrina the Great, the weird satanic trappings of the nation's capital, how Abraham Lincoln and JFK had been killed by pretty much the same people, magnificient cults comprised of powerful, ignorant but comfortably rich men, who had bought "the lie," and been led by men named Baines and Johnson, Hoover and Sirhan, Bush and Bundy, Twister, Big'un and Mule Boy, McGeorge ... and MacElvaine. This last name, the family crest and coat of arms of which featured in bright gold, outlined in black so that no one could miss it, the true Holy Grail, was really the name which ought to be on everyone's lips, everyone who hated Jesus because they hated men, in which Terry saw no logic. Love was love. Or a damn good likeness of it. Although some of the paint had been chipped away, and it said, as far as Terry could tell, Hograil.

"Heh, Harry Potter," Terry mused once.

As to where the real Holy Grail existed ... Terry, a former resident against his will in Ethiopia, having been drafted and specially trained to go there, was confident it was in Magdala, Ethiopia, where an impenetrable mountain fortress once stood majestically in the Ethiopian Highlands until it was overrun and torched. And by whom? The very people who actually believed that Jesus, whom they believed had faked his death in Jerusalem, despite the loss of blood and the fact that Jesus had stopped breathing, and had walked all the way to France and England either to become king or to settle down and raise a family of "master-racers," who, in turn, hated the Jews because of it. But Terry knew the secret. He knew that being Jewish hadn't been the only reason the Germans had become unpredictable. If Jesus was truly the father of all of these European children, then they were all Jews, by blood, and had to die. Poland, you can imagine, was confused. As were the English. But the French, true to form, had been begging for it. Was it because the French had been so emboldened by the legends and tall tales that Jesus' blood was their blood, despite the fact that there was no physical, facial resemblance and the French hated Jews? It was indeed a conundrum, one with which a certain writer of children's songs, a n'er-do-well, whose last name is a color, had a field day ... he and his ghost writers. And all of his elderly wife's lesbian friends who had convinced themselves that they could do something besides stay home and clean the carpet.

Jesus was God .. and he would prove it. And Terry hoped that he would do it by breaking geographical France in half, so Spain could have one half, if it wanted it, and England could have the other half, and would most likely decline, not willing to pay the service taxes, but only after looting all the treasure from the museums in Paris, making sure that no one ever found out that the Mona Lisa was actually a woman who had been the wife of the man, a duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, also known as "the Moor," who had commissioned Leonardo Da Vinci to paint "The Last Supper." If the English ever knew that, and if the French ever knew that the English knew, the Louvre could become a shrine ... to the stupidity of man, his ineptitude, his animalistic lusts, his taste for haute cuisine, and, above all things, lacking reason, lacking morals, lacking decency, telling secrets and being bigots and racists. It served them right, Terry often found himself concluding. "They mess with Jesus ... they're gonna get burned." Terry was always deathly serious when he said things about Jesus, because Terry had met Jesus when Terry was quite young, just after returning from a Christmas party at the Masonic hall where his mom was briefly a member of the Masons' auxiliary, the Mortar Girls Back East.

"Maybe East Bumblefuck," Terry had once said to a passing bum.

Now if he could just change his name, which he despised. He needed a prophetic name. Perhaps a real Cherokee name, since it seemed increasingly likely, perhaps probable, at least possible that he was one-sixteenth Cherokee Indian and was a direct target of telepathic waves from the invisible ring that circled the earth, where all the almost-there souls were kept in Purgatorty, a more relaxed version of Purgatory, where you didn't have to wear the things around your ankles and you could come and go as you pleased, as long as you returned with food, booze or reefer for the cops on duty. It was really like a country club, except no bars on the windows. And no bars.

A Cherokee name in a town where hundreds of thousands of Native Americans had been killed or rounded up like cattle for the trip to "Eden West" or, as it was also known, McCainville, "the beginning of the end of whitie." So a Cherokee name would be a good name for a prophet, if Terry could find someone. Terry believed he and his family actually lived on a Cherokee mound, which would explain some but not all of the unusual phenomena which had revealed itself ... for his whole family to see, often while screaming in their nightclothes. Still, they were not convinced. And the shouted revelations had not been enough to convince Terry's exasperated family that he was, in fact, someone whom God wasn't going to have evil strike dead for calling himself a prophet, that he would lnot et Lucifer eat, nor allow Terry to be turned into a human receptacle for the laying of eggs, which would fill some of the weaker ones to the brim with larvae. And only would because everybody kept telling him to get lost.

The truth, the true truth, in a nutshell, was to be found in two very cryptic verses of scripture in the Bible. Actually, there were several, but these were Terry's favorites, these were the ones when kept them buzzing long after he had left: "Who told you you were naked?" God said to Adam, as he hacked away at the animal hide on the dead carcass, and, (still being researched).

"A prophet doesn't have a home!" Terry yelled one day as his family was kicking him out, having hired Two Men and A Truck to physically remove him from the premises. "Or something like that!" He knew it wasn't. He'd blown another Bible verse in the heat of the moment, which was causing his stock as a prophet to plummet every time he screwed up and did it. But he would rise one more time off the mat. No, that hadn't been it. A lot wasn't it. But what was it ... was him. He knew it. Terry was determined to make something of himself, and it made sense, because he had The Gift. He had to do something with all of the evil spirits he had contracted as an intelligence specialist in East Africa during the Yom Kippur War of 1973 -- a conflict in which the village people with whom he lived had repeatedly told him he had shone.

"You're shining again," the Chieftain told Terry.

"Thanks." Terry had studied the face of the leader of the small tribe in Magdala, Ethiopia to be sure the Chieftain was not pulling Terry's leg, which the Chieftain was often wont to do, which wasn't the same as lying and deceit, Terry didn't think. The Chieftain called it "sending somebody up," which also made sense, because it sounded like something the murderous British might have said at the close of the 19th century. And it was such a special tribe, too, one that was too good for the Chieftain whose words frequently crossed over into the gray area. It was a tribe which claimed to be the true descendants of Mary. Not Mary of Magdala, who had never existed, at least not biblically, not as the celebrity she's been made out to be, nor Mary Magdalene, for the same reason, but Mary McElvaine, a name which had been lost, stolen by the Scots in the British Expedition of 1868. Mary of Macelvy was the one everyone wanted. She was the true Mary ... her and the other Mary whom the racist Europeans had hidden because she was an African, and because her son, a black man, a scholar, who had two names, had written most of the New Testament, half of the Gospels, even though the white nations and all of Terry's white friends wouldn't hear of it.

The Mary Magdalene business was going to have to stop somewhere. It would stop with Terry when he revealed the truth to the world, as it held its breath, as everyone was watching television or listening to their cell phones, which were no longer called cell phones, because they had advanced by this time into communications complexes, which had everything: TV, movies, email, postal mail, Western Union, games, stories, songs and fun ... but very little one-to-one speech and interaction, which Terry thought, all things considered, was probably a good thing. People already spent too much time talking ... and not enough listening. And, of course, they were all fitted with GPS technology, for two reasons: to help students at the Girls Preparatory School in town prepare for finals and their first, if ever, dates, and, so that it will be easier for the aliens to pick you up once all the borders and streets have been done away with and it's all purely longitude and latitude, waymarking, etc. And don't forget geocaching, the fun hobby to do with your family outside, while learning to follow the ways of the great Yahweh who usually made himself scarce, suspiciously, but would show up in his "ride," if either cow lungs, stomach or testicles were on the menu. Of course, Yah would pass on these delectables if they were needed to form spare body parts for the people who had been told they would live forever, but it wasn't going to be without "some work."

The expedition ordered by Queen Victoria was the most arduous military campaign ever undertaken by the English or anyone. Four-hundred miles over rugged terrain, carrying bags and satchels, leading donkeys and elephants, enormous cranes, and hundreds of strong Ethiopian men they had recruited by force upon reaching the ancient Ethiopian seaport of Massawa for the purpose of rescueing some British hostages and maybe take some stuff back with them. And Terry was on a mission to get those things back, all of it, all the treasures, to their rightful owners, the Ethiopian people, if he could just scrape up enough money with no home, clothes, food, shelter or family for a plane ticket. All he had was a small compact mirror, a keepsake which had belonged to Terry's wife, which he had snatched in the process of his removal from his own home. He used the mirror to practice the speech he was going to give at the British Museum and in Edinburgh, to let them know once and for all the jig was up. He knew the secret ... and soon the whole world would know, if he could get an agent, a publisher, a publicist, some clothes and some food.

"The idea!" Terry said, coating the mirror with a cascade of spittle. "The very idea." He nodded to himself. That sounded English enough. Now he would need some bags of his own, some beasts of burden, men to help him carry the booty from Scotland and England, from Edinburgh and London, back to where it rightfully belonged ... which was Eden, U.S.A. Or it would be called that, Terry was practically certain of it. If anyone got to Eden, somewhere in the vicinity of Magdala, overran it first, bombed it into submission, dug it up, put it back down, graded it, developed it and turned it into a multimillion dollar resort area ... with good spring water, the good ol' U.S.A. could do it, providing there were enough people left in the military and the American civilian population who had not given their hearts to Lucifer.

Migdal and Magaden almost sounded like Magdala and Magdalene, but weren't quite there, though you couldn't tell that to some people. Nor was Migdol, which always reminded Terry of Midol, which he at one time thought he might use to overdose while was he was in captivity, but his spear had been too short to reach the medicine cabinet. But they had become his people. He had impressed them with his knowledge of the Bible by pointing out all the mistakes in it, which evil had made in a vain attempt to steal from humanity ... its promised redemption.