Tom Robbins - Jitterbug Perfume

Pan remembered the breezy way they had crossed his pasture, fairly skipping as they walked, although that pasture, like all pastures in Arkadia, was weighted down with toe-stubbing rocks; and she had said, “It is so quiet out here I can hear my ears,” and he had shot back, “If your nose were your ears, the noise would be deafening.” Vaudeville was not dead. It wasn't born yet.

Spying on them from a bushy crag, Pan had to admit that they were as agreeable a pair of homers as he'd ever laid eyes upon ("homers” was what the surviving Greek gods secretly called mortals, a disparaging term taken from the name of the so-called bard who had spread so many lies about them). Pan admired the bounce in their step, the fun in their voice, the way they paused every fifty yards or so to fondle one another; Pan was curious about the silver pot that the female homer cradled against her round mooey breasts as if it were a babe, and Pan was amused when the male homer, when invited to inspect one of the woman's silk slippers (meant for padding about upon carpets and now ripped and frazzled by stones), had rolled it up and smoked it.

Oh, there was an air about them, all right, but it wasn't until they were directly beneath his perch that Pan, whose gaze had become fixed upon the prosperous sweep of the woman's hips — if ever a twat were a cornucopia, spilling forth meat puddings, hot wines, and sweets of every description: unending (shellfish) inexhaustible (peaches) infinite (mushrooms) feta feta feta forever, surely it was hers — it wasn't until her companion suddenly pinched his nostrils together and cried, “He's close by! I have got a whiff!", than Pan made the identification. Why, it was ex-King Whatsizname, that brash upstart from the north, the mad fellow who had gone off — was it fifty, sixty homer years ago? — to spike a petition on death's door. From the looks of him, death had considered his complaint. Well, well. .

Alobar was then one hundred and two, yet looked half his age, and the vigorous half at that. White hairs continued to populate his noble head, as if they were the familiars, the pale shadows of the chestnut filaments, which continued to dwell there, as well; but the phantoms, impotent, infertile in their ghost sheets, had failed to multiply and seemed content to just hang on, haunting the original inhabitants, who though they once might have quaked, had ceased to be afraid. Alobar had put on a few pounds and no longer carried himself like a warrior — Samye meditations had massaged the tension from his spine, Bandaloop transmissions had turned his spear-arm into a gaily waving thing — but pity the foolish young bully who noticed not the muscles turning and polishing themselves inside the lapidary of his tunic. His beard was trimmed after the Byzantine fashion, his various flashes of scar tissue had taken on a plum's brilliance, his sleet blue eyes looked out upon the world with a cub's curiosity and a papa bear's cunning. He blew playful puffs of slipper smoke through his nose.

Speaking of noses, his consort sported a grandiose banana that was almost musical in the way it curved. Upon a more angular woman it might have been ridiculous, but this dark creature was such a walking barrage of burpy bulges and bending lines that her nose blended perfectly into her contours. From the thick parabolas of her eyelids to the pronounced balls of her now bare feet, she was nonstop curve, three nymphs' worth of curve, a foreign contradiction to Greek geometry. The drool that rained from Pan's lips as he spied on her would have frozen in mid-drip had a reliable source informed him that she was as old as the grandmothers who milked the goats in nearby valleys, toothless skeletons (this one had a mouthful of pearly brights) whose only curves were in backs bent double over walking sticks. Kudra was sixty-six, Pan, and as you were to learn, as much as match for you as any homer girl you had ever piped into a pasture. Of course, you, yourself, Mr. Horny, were long past your prime. .

Yes, Mr. Goat Foot, despite the angry split between Rome and Constantinople, the tide of Christianity had not receded, but rather continued its slow, soupy flow into every nook and cranny of the land, until there was scarcely a pagan left whose heart and brain had not been lapped by it, lapped so long in many cases that old beliefs had been eroded, if not washed away, and you, Mr. Charmer, Mr. Irrational, Mr. Instinct, Mr. Gypsy Hoof, Mr. Clown; you, Mr. Body Odor, Mr. Animal Mystery, Mr. Nightmare, Mr. Lie in Wait, Mr. Panic, Mr. Bark at the Moon; yes, you, Mr. Rape, Mr. Masturbate, Mr. Ewe-bangi, Mr. Internal Wilderness, Mr. Startle Reaction, Mr. Wayward Force, Mr. Insolence, Mr. Nature Knows Best, you had been steadily losing your hold on the peasants and were now even weaker in flesh and spirit than when Alobar had seen you last. You were fading, and it was not a pretty sight, for you were a god, after all, with a god's strength; born, laughing and prancing, in the high golden circle where great and terrifying decisions are made. It hurt you to experience your popularity waning, it might have driven you to the wineskin were not the wineskin already, Mr. Sensual License, your lifelong friend; and it added to your misery to observe the effects of estrangement upon your former followers. In losing you, they were losing their body wisdom, their moon wisdom, their mountain wisdom, they were trading the live wood of the maypole for the dead carpentry of the cross. They weren't as much fun, anymore, the poor homers; they were straining so desperately for admission to paradise that they had forgotten that paradise had always been their address. That's why you were attracted to this unlikely couple that came skipping into your meadow, the woman in clear communion with the booming bells of her meat, the man unafraid of appearing frivolous in the eyes of Christ as he caressed a poppy while puffing on a shoe. You would have admired them even had they not been sniffing you out, which, of course, they were.

Pan suspected, and rightly so, that the couple's gaiety, their cockiness and élan, was somehow the result of Alobar's successful petition against death, and, more than anyone else, the beleaguered god probably could have imagined the anguished expression minted into the other side of the immortalist coin.

To witness Kudra then, giggling and barefoot among the poppies, it would have been hard for anyone to picture her on her knees in a Constantinople pantry, weeping and wailing, shaking like the shuttle in an overachiever's loom, begging Shakti, Shiva, Kali, and Krishna to forgive her for rebelling against divine authority. (And it is divine authority, is it not, that insists that we must die? That grants us consciousness for a few decades, then, no matter how gloriously we have used it, snatches it away? Surely, the human race committed some heinous atavistic crime for the gods to inflict it with mortality, as they have; and isn't it a worsening of our crime, a compounding of our guilt, to try to escape our just punishment?) Even after absorbing the Bandaloop legacy (or part of it, at least), Kudra could never quite overcome the feeling that, in defying death, she was doing something wrong and would be made to pay for it in some prolonged and unspeakably excruciating way. When in Alobar's company, when meditating or bathing, she could exult in a body that remained firm and juicy while thousands about her withered away, but alone in the frottage of twilight, awaiting Alobar's return from the spice docks, fear would ooze out of the brown pit of her chin dimple, and, whimpering, she would turn from one deity to another, even bizarre Ganesh, with his elephant head, pleading for mercy for not having submitted to a widow's death in the rope yard.

Now Alobar had grown up in a more intimate relationship with his gods. His snored in magic tree trunks and twinkled in the constellations, frequently emerging, mossy-haired or moon-burned, to fraternize with humanity, sharing human foibles and appetites. As a king in the forests of what would one day be called Bohemia, Alobar, himself, had been deemed half divine. Still, he, too, felt odd and uncomfortable at times, felt a gulf widening between himself and his fellows who went uncomplaining to the grave. “Am I clinging to my individual being only to have it grow inhuman and strange?” he would agonize. “Am I inviting a revenge worse than simple annihilation?”