THE SEX REBEL OF JESUSLAND, chapter 147

147. EVE AND ADAM AND EZRA IN BED

She was undressing them while she talked. They lay naked on the carpet. She turned her back to Ezra. She held Adam in one hand, and then he realized Ezra was inside her, because Ezra was moving very purposefully. Adam felt excluded, alone, but then she slid him inside her and he realized that Ezra was at the other portal, the forbidden one, the one of the total sexual outlaw, the sodomy cowboy.

Now he saw what it was for Eve: not a sin against God, but a transgression against Jesusland. For someone to whom God was absent, like Eve, this was an act of politics. An act of transgression, of rebellion, of revolt. What Scarlet was for him at the rally: an initiation into being a more extreme sexual outlaw. Sharing Eve with Ezra was another step along the way to being an utterly defiant sexual outlaw in Jesusland. And in their circle of defiance, his defiance was the smaller, weaker one. Ezra was a bigger outlaw than him, because he was at the true outlaw portal, and Eve was the biggest outlaw of them all, exerting the outlaw power of the female, the power that was not supposed to exist -- using them, her male superiors, to shout out against the society, to register and complete her rebellion against the status of male and female in Jesusland, against all the forces of Jesusland -- to violate all its norms with two men in a circle of three, this most unnatural number.

Eve was stepping outside everything around her. He, Adam, was one of the instruments of her female revolt.

Then he fell out of his mind and his thought-world, out of his old confusion and his new clarity, into the physicality of what they were doing. He felt a moment of carnal relief at the familiarity of her flesh, followed by the intrusion of his own appreciation of the flesh-fast physicality of their act, as his member became conscious of itself, the penetration of thoughts into the constraint of the purely physical. It could feel Ezra’s sex, as though it was scraping against it.

He was not only sharing himself with Eve, he was sharing himself with Ezra. She was a conduit to Ezra. He stopped thinking about it and gave himself over to the whole thing. He became his organ, a consciousness without thought. He was where he had never been, in a thoughtless space of urgency. The only thing this space possessed was urgency, exerting itself to release. It was thoughtless. It was indifferent. It had only its own anxiety for release, and he felt free of sentimentality, free of love. He was an instrument of the universe. He was not himself. He was free to serve. He was serving a woman.

Eve had known what she wanted to do as soon as she was in the room together with the two men. It was not just about power. She had thought about sex a lot in prison, sex and God, and when God went absent, she had thought about sex by itself. It was an abomination that she was going to die without sex. She would not have minded death if it came with sex, or right thereafter. Orgasm seemed like a death, a referent of it, a reminder of an end, a smaller end that gave her an inkling of the big end of death. The release of sex was the release of death. Sex was a way of entering into the mindless indifference of the universe. It was a paradox that it produced offspring, and that this offspring brought about the sentimentality that was all that people had with which to face the indifference. The sentimentality that created God. Religion was the codification of sentimentality. Religion feared sex, because sex was part of the indifference. That was what she now believed. In fact, she didn’t have to believe it. She knew it, because she had come to it while she faced death. If God allowed her to be condemned to death, unfairly, there could be no God. The Men of the Gospel needed God as a glue to keep society in order. She thought she needed Him to face death, but she did not. She did not even need sentimentality. But she would have liked to have sex. Sex was the only thing strong enough, indifferent enough, to take away her fear of death. She contemplated sex, and it helped. She did not want the sentimentality of religion anymore, of God, of the United States under Christ, all those props of life. She had wished she had power, and she still wished it. It was a way of being above the sentimentality. It was a way of orchestrating the sentimentality of others. It was a way of living with the indifference, to lord it over others, to rule, to fix their lives in patterns created, consciously created by the Bureau of Behavior Design and Management, to be like Proctor and his electricity. It was a new way to exercise power, not within tradition, not like a king or a democracy within institutions that built up over time, but outside tradition, sitting on top, and deciding upon behaviors that would bind people together in advantageous ways consciously, like an architect designing a structure that did not exist before, like God designing the universe before there was one. It was a way of being God, of looking at people and their tiny worlds as a blank slate on which to write with the freedom of power. That was true freedom: power over others. The freedom of the few to rule the many.

It was the freedom of standing over Jesusland, outside it and therefore over it, true to nothing but her own desire, her own action, her own will to power over these two men in her life. Her ambition for power had arrived at its apex. She was the arena and space where these men connected, and they were in her power, because she had sucked them both into her. She was one and they were two. They were the world, and she was the center of the world. She made the rhythm, and they followed.

She was also a woman, and they were men. She was ruling over men. They were her mice, her antelopes. They were the sacrifice for her pleasure. She could feel their individual struggles inside her, and it increased her power. Such puny creatures, these men, breathing hard, slaving away at their petite little efforts.

She turned herself against them, a wheel of power, and she turned them out of her: they fell from her, and she guided the one man into the other, the men followed her guidance, the violation and the transgression now different, now between one man and the other.

The one transgressing, the other being transgressed. The one entering, the other being entered. The norms of Jesusland were wholly violated as she steered the one into the other. They were pinned upon shame: the one doing the penetrating felt the horror of the other being penetrated, and the one being penetrated felt the horror of the other doing such a thing. The one a new home to the other. A new beauty of horror.

Then she tore them apart and shared them again, wheeling them back into her, and now it became a thing of glory to her, the two outlaws towards each other now outlawing themselves inside her again, back from transgressing in each other to transgressing in her, sharing her as their final arena of the revolt she had decreed against Jesusland. I have changed them, she thought. I have constructed them anew. I have reordered them, realigned them, in a new and unprecedented shock therapy of sex. I have completed the journey of my own invention of sex, the sex that speaks against Jesusland, now and forever. We have become rebels, each one of us in ourselves, and also bonded in our unholy circle of three, this number that in itself is a transgression. We have crossed the borders of our world. We have smashed the container built for us. We have broken the vessel. We have become ultimate outlaws.

They went off inside her like two shots, first Ezra, then Adam, two deaths making one life, the shots that would render them finally helpless, the agony of helplessness after working hard, the animals becoming conscious again, coming to themselves, and it set her over the edge: a flower unfolding, a jellyfish spreading its jelly, the cells of a blip of a fetus developing a nervous system, splicing itself into the beginnings of intelligence. She trembled, hit by a giant slap, flapping between them like a flag in a storm, riding their two little deaths like a nerve caught by two nails, like a mouse in the jaws of a snake, like a buck losing its limbs to a tribe of lions, herself splitting from herself, eaten by the world, torn off into parts to feed the indifference of the world and to pulverize the bounds of this society, this citadel of sanctioned behavior, this walled interior of the Gospel, this house of God, this embrace of a now shattered Jesusland.
She lay there, breathless, and then she felt a great presence. Who was it? God? When last had He spoken to her? I forgive you, child. Was He here now?

No. This could not be Him. I have accepted His absence. I accepted His abandonment, and turned it into His absence. Maybe this was the radiation after the nuclear explosion, the fall-out from God’s absence.

Yes. This was more than a rebellion against Jesusland. I took my fight to God Himself. With this act I challenged God in His absence from me, along with the society made in His likeness.

Now I lie here, and what is left of my relationship with God, the central fact of my existence up to now? The God I grew up with, the God whom the Men of the Gospel tells us to worship – their personification of a male authority figure, an older man of immense power with a beard – I refute that man-made idea of God. I take His beard in my hand, and I rip it off. I castrate that God. I demasculinize Him, like I want the whole of Jesusland emasculated. I make God over in my image, my idea of God.

I make God a woman.

I change my universe, because I change its guiding principle. No longer am I a woman aspiring to be a Virgin Mary, to commune with God, to bear a child from a man that is His child, because it comes from male seed. No longer do I reach to heaven with my sex through an angel.

No. I make God a female, and now I am God on earth. I represent the divine female, instead of aspiring to be with the divine male. Now I, as a representative of divine femininity, reach down to these two men. They are mere men now, not stand-ins for God, and I am no handmaiden, I am the divine goddess, and I reach down and subject these two men to my divine female desire. My desire is divine, it knows no bounds: I choose both of them.

I return to God. I have banished the male God from my consciousness, and I welcome God back into my soul as Female.