title: The Bodywanderer
author: Kroncke, Francis
description: Luke, once Friar Alfred, leaves the monastic order of The Brooders, whose communal dreaming maintains the mythic structure of reality. His task was to dream Genesis, but something eerie that makes him shudder drives him away. It's the 1960s and he is Black Ops in Vietnam; trained as an assassin. Three women: Rian, Sunflower and Laura upend his sexual identity and understanding of the feminine both mythically and intimately. Driven as he is, he joins raids on draft boards and is arrested. Instead of prison he is sent back to Nam to assassinate the country's Cardinal, who is himself a Brooder. Unless the Cardinal dies, the war will not end! Luke ends up in Southern California where he meets Laura, a highly skilled massage therapists who can read his life as she wanders his body—a bodywanderer! Attraction and repulsion are the rhythm to their struggle to become lovers, but together they begin to dream as beloveds and so counter the twisted male dreams of the monastic Brooders. Luke and Laura make present a mythic story—one that counters the biblical Adam and Eve story—that enables them to discover a deeply sensual and intimate embrace through which they become one.