Free WLT by Garrison Keillor Page B

Facility, Vitality) and the Seven Doorways of Celestial Selection. These are brief openings in the cosmos, when a great leap of spiritual knowledge is attainable. Now she was turning her attention more toward ethereology and the science of electivism with its vast lore on the determining power of radiation. Radiation was Patsy’s true passion, the study of the nimbus of light around the body. The practiced eye could read it like a book.
    â€œWhat do you see in me?” he whispered.
    She studied his nimbus and frowned and read his palm and then she asked him to take his shoes off so she could read the lifeline on his soles.
    She held his bare foot and thought long and hard. “You are a man of a generous soul but starved for truth. You lie to yourself. You are swift of intuition, but you lack depth. But you are seeking to improve. You know your time is not long. You try to penetrate the darkness. And you are trying to get me to take my clothes off.”
    He agreed that this was true and inquired if it were possible.
    She said that there is a hand of inevitability that guides these matters and it can only be perceived with time.
    They shared a glass of sherry, and then he drank another. They sat cheek to cheek and he told her about New York, how majestic it was in the fall, the rattle of the trains and the deep-carpeted hush of the big hotels and the golden light at dusk on the avenues and the happy throngs pouring into the theaters and afterward the cafes, and he kissed her. He told her that for all her knowledge of electivism, he knew something about pleasure, pure simple enjoyment, which is the main advantage of adulthood: the freedom to amuse ourselves as we like. He kissed all her fingers, then her lips and her ears, and along her neck, and then he opened her blouse. The buttons were like butter.
    â€œI need to know your sense of the emanations of this moment,” she said, softly. “Do you sense the fields of light?” Yes, he did. Her shoulders were so young. He slipped off her blouse—how lightly it slid on her skin— and opened the straps of her light blue chemise. It fell like a leaf to her waist, revealing the two dazzling white emanations of her brassiere.
    She said the pulsation of energies was very strong, he should almost be able to feel it. He did. He reached behind her, his left cheek touching her little ear and a delicious wisp of her black hair brushing by, and unclasped the Three Hooks of Advancement and gently removed the garment. He set it on the couch and lightly touched her dark nipples, big as half dollars.
    â€œNow,” she said. “Turn out the light and tell me what color is the nimbus. Around my body you may see a spectrum of shades, shadows tinged with color, called the antinodes and antipodes, but one light is strongest, the parhelion, do you see it?”
    â€œI see so many colors—”
    â€œWhich color is strongest to you?”
    â€œWhite.”
    She grimaced. “I thought you might be my true opposite, but I don’t think you see any pulsations at all,” she said. She put her blouse on. “You weren’t even close,” she said.
    â€œLet me try again.”
    She smiled. “I am psychic, I know what’s on your mind.”
    â€œI want to know more. You’ve shown me so much I was not aware of and I want to go farther.”
    â€œAll you want is to get on top of me and shove it in,” she said. “I want to have sexual concord with your totality.”
    He said he was not only interested in that, that he was interested in her , that sex was his way of getting to know her, that he admired her as an artist, that he could get the Cowgirls their own radio show, perhaps a Saturday night spot.
    â€œI’m so sick of yodelling, I could spit,” she said. She told him she wanted to be a writer. Her dream was to write plays and movies and stories that would help people understand the principles of