"Yes," I said in the tiniest of voices. "I like it not, but I do believe I do."
And then, as if to dull the edge of the knife, the spirit of the Joker emerged once more, and spoke in a tone of the most loving cynicism. "Besides, spiritual imperatives and financial considerations coincide. Since the funds I need to travel are paid for with time, I can't afford a free rider, now can I?" Somehow this entirely false mingyness, under the circumstances, was the tenderest mercy of all.
We stared into each other's eyes for a long silent moment, saying good-bye, or, I dared hope, auf wiedersehen, hugging each other's spirits; he long since centered on the acceptance of this as his self-chosen destiny, I not having the least notion as to what my future destiny might be.
Then, as the silent communion began to stretch into a poignant agony, Pater, with his perfect mastery of timing, laughed, shrugged, and screwed his face into the comic rendition of a mean- spirited little boy. "And speaking of value given for value received," he said in an ironic tone, "now that I have shared the deepest secret of my soul, you must reveal the secret of the magic in your touch."
"Well spoken!" I giggled, amazed to find such laughter bubbling up in my spirit as if at the Piper's bidding. "Indeed, far more well spoken for once than the speaker himself believes."
I removed the ring of Touch from my finger and ceremoniously placed it on the little finger of Pater's right hand.
"This?" he exclaimed. "This common piece of bazaar jewelry is the source of your power?"
"Designed without esthetic appeal or apparent economic value to discourage the attention of thieves," I told him ... Attends." So saying, I reached out, took his hand, thumbed on the ring, and before he knew what I was about, had draped his hand squarely upon his own lingam.
The look that came onto his face at once should have been captured in halo or oils by a master craftsman, for I have never, before or since, seen such a melange of amazement, pleasure, befuddlement, and embarrassment appear in such a simultaneous manner on a human visage. He pawed at himself experimentally and stilled a moan. He stroked the inside of his own thigh. He stared at the ring in befuddled delight.
"Merde!" he exclaimed. "I would be the last to deny the esteem in which I hold my own person, but even I would never have believed I could so love myself!"
"My father made it," I told him. "He calls it the Touch."
"Your father? Cuanto cuesta? Surely you can prevail upon him to grant a discount to an amigo? With this and the already puissant prowess of the great Pater Pan, I could plow a course through the women of the worlds that would make Don Juan and Casanova seem like dour celibates!"
"No doubt," I said dryly. "But it is unobtainable at any price. In all the worlds of men, mine is the only one there is, and my father has sworn an oath that no more will be made until I give my leave."
"Pas problem! Only direct him to make a single exception ..."
"And loose what priapic demon on the innocent women of the worlds?"
"Vraiment," Pater said quite seriously, removing the ring and placing it in my hands. "If every lover in all the worlds of men wore such a ring, what would become of the tantric art? If all of us were perfect masters of pleasure, would we still recognize those moments when via the flesh two true spirits meet?"
"I have noticed no lack of such a communion of the spirit between us ..." I pointed out.
"I am not utterly convinced that such a device may not corrode the courage of love's spirit ..."
"I feel no corrosion of my lover's courage!" I insisted.
"Bien. Then you will not object to my suggestion that our last passage d'amour on Edoku be au naturel. Is it not now just that the natural woman now emerge from her magic fortress to bid a true lover bon voyage?"
"Well spoken," I impulsively declared, for the trepidation I felt at his words, bizarrely akin to that of a young virgin about to disrobe for the first time before her lover, only served to spur me on. For what is courage except in the face of fear, and what is love if not the baring of one's own naked and imperfect truth?
So saying, I unwound my Gypsy Joker's sash from about my waist, and began to undress. In truth did I experience something of the trepidatious joy of a virgin's premiere performance, though fortunately not the useless ignorance of same.
Then we were in each other's arms and the truth of it was that while the duration and sensual intensity of the artistic performance might have been less preternaturally sustained, the essence of the experience, stripped down to the essentials of lingam and yoni, was quite the same.
At first each of us strove to overmaster the other with pleasure, and if this loverly contest was now more equal, indeed if for once Pater did obtain the upper hand, the outcome of this almost jocular overture was as before -- we proceeded on to the next movement, in which the duality of giving and receiving pleasure was annihilated in the experience of pleasure itself, and two spirits reached a single cusp.
Vraiment, for once it was but a single cusp, and for once, neither of us felt the need to essay or offer more. Which is not so much to say that we were sated as to say that in tantra, as in any other art, we both realized with the wisdom of our flesh, one does not mar a perfect miniature by attempting to blow it up into a work of epic proportions.
"It would appear that yours is a lover's spirit capable of surviving such power," Pater said at length when we had covered ourselves and snuggled together in the dark. "Myself, I would not trust who, I wonder, is the real Gypsy, and who the real Joker?"
"The two of us," I said, strangely content now to lie in the arms of this man who would be leaving on the morrow.
"I will be gone when you awake," Pater said, as if reading my thoughts. "Better to say auf wiedersehen now than in a tearful morning, ne. I will cut a patch from your tunic before I go and leave you a patch of mine to sew into your sash, so that we will each wear a patch of the other's karma in the fabric of our destinies."
Touched, I kissed him lightly on the cheek. "Leave me with one thing more," I asked him. "Moussa is a kindernom given me by my parents in homage to the patron creature of an innocent childhood long since past. Give me then a true name for the Child of Fortune of the road, and I in turn will promise not to assume it until I am worthy, which is to say until I have earned my first coin as a ruespieler. Thereafter, it will be the name you have given me until we meet again or forever, whichever comes first."
"A name for the ruespieler you will one day be ...?" Pater said thoughtfully. "Bien, I dub thee Sunshine, light of the world and Lucifer's daughter, a star among many but equal to all, and the sacramental wafer of the Children of Fortune of the Age of Space."
"Sunshine ..." I muttered sleepily. ''It seems rather an extravagant name."
"Would I name you for anything less than glory? Sunshine you will be when you are ready to shine forth in the dark."
Those are the last words I remember him speaking that night, though no doubt there were less coherent endearments muttered in that hypnagogic limbo of lost memory occluded by the impending onset of sleep.
True to his word, when I awoke, the King of the Gypsies and the Prince of the Jokers had vanished from my world.
Chapter 11
Our immediate general response as Gypsy Jokers on the morrow of Pater Pan's departure was to make a valiant effort to carry on in the spirit of the tribe, both in homage to his legend, and out of a certain twisted quest for exoneration in his eyes that was not without its aspect of psychic vengeance. Which is to say we developed the retrospective perception that our missing protector and patron had never really worked at any of the enterprises we had established save as founder and inspirational dilettante. Were we ourselves not true Children of Fortune, vraiment were we not Gypsy Jokers? Surely we could maintain the spirit and commerce of the carnival on our own!
Naturellement, in moments of reflection even at the time, I understood all too well that the wound which Pater's departure had inflicted on our spirits was designed to produce precisely this response. Nor could I deny the justice in the challenge. If we were unable to be Gypsy Jokers without Pater Pan, how could we have counted ourselves worthy of being Gypsy Jokers with him?
And indeed for a time, to our credit, we succeeded in maintaining our enterprises by our own efforts. Ruespielers, hawkers, and buskers ventured forth as before, the tents of our caravanserei continued to draw customers for tantric performances, games of chance, and entertainments, and craftsmen continued to produce their wares.
Vraiment, it appeared that Pater's departure had truly served to teach the lesson he had intended. Whether what happened next was another koan prepared for our rough-hewn edification by Pater Pan or whether it was a malfunction of his scenario is difficult to clarify even in retrospect, for it hinged upon the peculiarly Edojin creative ambiguity towards matters of legal philosophy.
As I have said, the erection of Child of Fortune favelas was supposedly proscribed on Edoku, or at least as proscribed as anything short of violence or outright rapine could get. Indeed as far as anyone knew, the encampment of the Gypsy Jokers was the sole exception to this mandate, and as to how Pater Pan had cozened the Edojin into granting it, this was as great a mystery among us as the means whereby the Edojin enforced their displeasure against potential encampments of other tribes.
For if I have failed in the course of this narrative to adequately describe or even mention the governing councils and law enforcement officials of Great Edoku, it is not out of oversight or sloth. From the perspective of the Child of Fortune, such councils and officials were entirely non- existent, since one never perceived such personages or their policies in evidence. Enforcement of the civilized niceties simply occurred; the apprehension and punishment of thieves and pickpockets by impromptu posses which Pater had turned into a remunerative enterprise seemed to be the general model of how the body politic of Edoku dealt with miscreants.
As to how the encampment of the Gypsy Jokers had become selfed to the social immune system of the body politic of Edoku, the subtlety of Pater Pan's politicking only began to emerge into view as matters began to deteriorate in its absence.
Within a week of the Mardi Gras parade, the custom of the encampment, far from being augmented by the mythos of this event, began to measurably decline. This was most pronounced when it came to the products of the craftsmen, which all at once seemed to be out of favor. Even the jewelry of Ali went begging for customers at reduced prices at his stand in the encampment, and it soon began to seem pointless for me to try to peddle it in the streets and parks.
The quality and artistry of our crafts had not declined, but alas, they had never found favor on the basis of same in the first place. Rather they had been emblematic artifacts of the treasured quaintness and romantic spirit of the Child of Fortune, to whom one gave ruegelt as an act of fond remembrance to one's own wanderjahr.
Perhaps Pater had been too cunning for our own good, for his own mythos had been such a selling point of our mystique that when it abandoned that mystique in public, our quaintness lost its wu, we were once more perceived as scruffy urchins, and trinkets that had once been votive items in the cult of our spirit were now regarded by the Edojin as tawdry junk.
It was not long thereafter that our tantric tableaus began to play to empty tents, and even those inviting participation began to lose their trade. For once the spirit of the Child of Fortune lost its currency as a stylistic mode, the Child of Fortune was no longer a popular fantasy of the erotic imagination. And on Edoku, where every fantasy of the imagination was made manifest, we could hardly compete with the thousand-and-one delights on the basis of our artistry alone.
As for solo tantric performance, which when all was said and done had been my only reliable source of ruegelt, a night in a tent pretending you were once more a Child of Fortune or an al fresco adventure with same upon momentary whim in the nearest garden, once they were no longer considered wu, became acts of esthetic barbarity.
Well did I come during this devolution to understand the reticence of lordly tribesmen to be observed by denizens of the Public Service Stations partaking of fressen bars! The only of our enterprises that retained some vitality was the vending of finger food from trays, for even the Edojin developed instant cravings for a snack, and would weigh not heavily esthetic judgments if the smell of same reached a hungry palate.
Soon, therefore, our cooks were importuned by hordes of their indigent comrades and lovers, for there was hardly anyone in the encampment who did not have a claim of friendship with one cook or another as I did with Dani. How could he stand idly by and gain profit by peddling his dim sum to the Edojin while I was reduced to choking down fressen? How could he refuse similar alms to anyone else with the same moral claim? How could any true Gypsy Joker see another, and by extension his whole tribe, humiliated in the Public Service Stations when he had the means and the art to prevent his fellow tribesmen from descending to fressen?