Enter Salome, dancing

He still had no final name for the experience. Dream missed all the power of it. It was true that the first time it happened he was in the process of falling asleep, his senses disconnected from all the shabby demands of a disgusting world, his mind’s eye free to see what it would see, but there the superficial resemblance to common dreaming ended.

Vision was a larger, better word for it, but it, too, failed to convey even a fraction of the impact.

Guiding light captured a certain facet of it, an important facet, but the soap-opera association polluted the meaning hopelessly.

A guided meditation, then? No. That sounded trite and unexciting—the opposite of the experience itself.

A living fable?

Ah, yes. That was getting closer. It was, after all, the story of his salvation, the new pattern of his life’s purpose. The master allegory for his crusade.

His inspiration.

All he had to do was turn out the lights, close his eyes, put himself in the infinite potential of the darkness.

And summon the dancer.

In the embrace of the experience, the living fable, he knew who he was—so much more clearly than he did when his eyes and heart were distracted by the glittering trash and slimy cunts of the world, by noise, by seduction and filth.

In the embrace of the experience, in its absolute clarity and purity, he knew exactly who he was. Even if he was now, technically, a fugitive, that fact—like his name in the world, the name by which ordinary people knew him—was secondary to his true identity.

His true identity was John the Baptist.

Just thinking of it gave him gooseflesh.

He was John the Baptist.

And the dancer was Salome.

Ever since the first time he’d had the experience, the story had been all his, his to live and his to change. It didn’t have to end the stupid way it ended in the Bible. Far from it. That was the beauty of it. And the thrill of it.