Voices from Beyond (PART 2 OF 4)
To Juan’s surprise, he sees 12 female strippers on a sprawling glass floor suspended 22 feet above the ground in a large bright red Victorian-styled ballroom. The twerk anthem “My Bitch Make the Sun Bust,” blares through invisible booming speakers that are positioned everywhere yet nowhere at once. Eleven of the females are voluptuous Black women of various shapes, sizes, and complexions.
One is a white woman with platinum blonde hair, an inviting smile, and biting blue eyes. She has a relatively slender, athletic build. She was probably a track star in high school. All of the women are in glass stilettos circumnavigating the stripper pole at the center of the glass platform like devout Muslims rotating around the Ka’aba.
Although they’re all walking, not one woman is missing a beat. They all have $2,160 stuffed into their silver thongs that shimmer like imminent stars, while binding their buttery bodies with the blinding luminosity of feminine intrigue. The music stops. Eleven of the women are standing in a circle staring at Juan as one steps away from the pole.
She is a syrupy-thick, dark-skinned Black woman with a voluminous afro and soft chocolate fudge breasts that look sweet to a man’s touch. Her corpulent, frame is a lively display of geometric perfection. The music resumes, and the Afrotopian goes into an intense twerk session while holding a wine glass in her right hand.
Despite her delicate grasp, she doesn’t spill a drop of its content while dancing. What looks like a large hologram of the flaming sun slowly appears behind the 12 women. The harder the woman dances, the hotter the sun gets, and the faster it pulsates, filling the room with fervent heat.
“My bitch make the sun bust...Booty poppin’ bitches twerkin’; my chain truck,” is the mantra repetitively spat over the heart-pounding 808 bass in a heavy Southern drawl by Yung Nasty. Nasty claims to be from the streets, but he is actually a Harvard University alum from a middle class family.
The Black rapper is secretly employed by the United States government through the C.I.A’s COINTELPRO program. Nasty is paid millions of dollars a year to demean young Black women, and dehumanize young Black men through his government-sponsored audio sorcery that decorates Leukemic hollow bone syndrome rhymes posing as rhythm and poetry.
The sun is slowly turning from red to orange, then from green to indigo, and finally, violet. Two serpents made of electricity entwine themselves around the copper stripper pole. As
they meet each other face to face at the very top they both vibrate to the beat of Nasty’s song like the bright neon volume meters on a stereo sound system.
The perspiring ebony dancer’s grace and unapologetic confidence radiates a sensual power that has Juan completely mesmerized. He feels somewhat intimidated by this mysterious goddess, but he is still infatuated with her and the electro-magnetism that she generates from her body all at the same time.
Juan walks into the chamber without taking his eyes off of the stripper who still has the glass in her hand and rusty broken chains latched to her wrist and ankle bracelets. Juan stands directly underneath her as she looks down at him dancing from her glass floor which is also Juan’s glass ceiling.
She pours liquid from her cup on her floor. It immediately burns through Juan’s ceiling and spills all over his unsuspecting face. Juan instinctively closes his eyes after the splash, as his heart skips a beat. To his own surprise, the flesh on his face is not consumed by the seemingly combustible liquid. With his eyes closed, Juan wipes it with the dirty handkerchief that is in the back pocket of his Sasson jeans.
When Juan opens his eyes, he discovers that he is no longer in the stripper chamber. He is suspended in outer space amongst distant stars. He looks down to see what could be holding him up and he observes nothing but empty space. The north pole of the glowing
orange planet Saturn is thousands of miles beneath his feet, but he’s still close enough to see it in detail. It has a hexagonal opening at its very top. Juan finds its rings far more breathtaking than the high definition digital photos taken by space probes can convey.
Countless sparks of white light race each other in a perpetual track-meet through spectral, pastel-colored rings that encircle the planet. The rapidly rotating sparks randomly give off bright flashes of majesty that extend several light years into the depths of outer space.
The surreal imagery of the magnanimous planet is too much for Juan’s mortal mind to process. Emotionally overwhelmed by the horrible beauty that he sees below him, Juan lifts his head up and screams like Robert Plant on “Immigrant Song.” Juan immediately plummets downward. In the vacuum of space he can’t hear a thing, not even his own cry of despair. As he is sucked into Saturn’s North Pole at an indeterminate speed, he can’t breathe at all.
Juan feels as if he is about to pass out from a total lack of oxygen. He is terrified by his turbulent fall. Still he can’t wait to enter Saturn’s atmosphere as the planet offers the only chance he has to get some air into his chest. After a few minutes, just as his lungs feel like they are about to violently explode, Juan enters Saturn’s atmosphere. He instantly feels weightless.
Although Juan still can’t breathe, he suddenly feels as if he doesn’t have to. The energies of life flow freely towards him, and through him,
without effort. Juan is fully awake and feeling more alert and a lot stronger than he has ever recalled in his life. His vision is crystal clear. He sees vibrant, new colors. It’s as if he woke up from a long dream, wherein he looked at life as a dark silhouette through an opaque veil of ignorance. As Juan looks to his left, he sees wisdom.
His corpse continues falling at a much faster rate than he is into the planet’s cloudy orange atmosphere. Beneath this foggy sky lie Saturn’s great mysteries. As soon as Juan sees his own dead body disappear into Saturn’s clouds below he freezes in mid-air instinctively as if he has been doing so his entire life. Watching his own body fall, Juan is completely oblivious to his superhuman feat of aerial defiance.
The mouth of a woman with strawberry-red lipstick suddenly appears in the hazy sky directly in front of Juan. Her 32 teeth are rabid white supremacists. The mouth sticks out its tongue which serves as a tender bridge into a gaping mystery. 72 bees fly out. “Come and see,” says the same female voice that Juan heard earlier.
This time Juan can tell for sure that the voice is coming from inside the anonymous woman’s mouth. Juan Enters. Right beneath the tonsils he sees a long winding staircase leading downwards. From the distance, Juan can see an entranceway shaped like another hexagon. When he gets to the bottom, he looks through the opening and then he sees her.
“Tantalah!!!” he screams. In the distance is his wife mounted on a crystal throne arrayed in solid gold garments wearing the ram’s crown which is her royal emblem of planetary sovereignty. Her eyes are as radiant as ever, sparkling with a rich, yet defiant, beauty. On both sides of her throne are white saber- toothed lions. Each one of them has four wings and eight eyes. Oblivious to the lions’ presence, Juan races toward Tantalah. The two lions growl simultaneously in direct defiance toward his presence.
A scorching ring of fire surrounds Tantalah’s throne halting Juan in his tracks. His face filled with shock and agony, Juan breathlessly asks for Tantalah to let him through the ring of fire. As Juan entertains the thought of running through the blaze to get to her, a fire serpent leaps out of the ring in a failed attempt to lash Juan like a slave master’s whip, urging him to get back in line. Juan takes a few steps back before it can touch him.
“The lions will let you in, but only on one condition,” says Tantalah. “You must answer one question, for me.” Juan looks her directly in her eyes. “Of course; What do you want to know?” he replies. “I want to know why you are in pain,” she says. Immediately Juan begins to black out like he did on that fateful night in 1986.