Common Ground
Technically sort of continuing the Mano series from With The Flow, Sources, Promised Land, and Saltwater, to be continued and merged with the Rakim and Klein series into Surface. Enjoy!
'I don't need God. All I need is an amoeba!' (Greater Than One)
Mandrake had had a complex relationship with his father when he'd been growing up. His father had been both a prominent psychologist and a deeply pious Jewish man. It had therefore been difficult for him to disentangle his relationship with his father from his relationship with Judaism and with psychology, which had both been fraught with ambivalence and ambiguity. The otter could not reject or accept anything wholesale about any of all three.
Mandrake had gone to see psychologists when he'd been a child. He hadn't really cared for it. He hadn't really been sure of why his father had encouraged him to do so at the time. Had his father seen something broken and horrible in his mind, something so wrong that it needed to be fixed by someone whose job it had been to fix people's minds when something went wrong with them? His father had insisted that it had just been good mental hygiene. He'd told Mandrake that he'd believed that, in an ideal world, everyone would be able to afford to see a psychologist, just as everyone should have been able to see a doctor for physical illnesses.
When he'd become a teenager, and had started realizing that he'd been attracted to other men, Mandrake had become even more embittered toward his father's beliefs and profession. Mandrake had kept going to the synagogue, and he had still believed in God in his own way, but he had become increasingly cynical toward any earthly authorities who had claimed to speak in His name. Mandrake had believed that there should have been a commandment to honor your children if you had some just as there had been a commandment to honor your parents. Else it had seemed to stack the deck against him in a world that had already disfavored him enough.
When he'd started making pagan friends, he'd become disgusted with the notion that 'thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.' Psychology had uncomfortably echoed some of passages from Leviticus that had encouraged people to kill people for having had the 'wrong' sexuality. He'd decided early on that there would never be a context in which he'd make excuses for such words. These were no word of God but the words that narrow-minded men had put in His mouth.
When Mandrake had been a child, his father had taken him on vacation to a port town. In one of the souvenir shops, Mandrake had asked him to buy him a lobster plushie, and had begun to sleep with it every night. He would ask his little plush lobster to tell him astonishing tales of the sea before he would drift off to sleep, happy with his little fuzzy friend looking at him cutely. When he had first seen people eat lobster around him, he had broken down in tears.
It had been hard for a lot of Jewish otters not to eat shellfish. Shellfish had been renowned far and wide as the favorite food of otters. The expression 'he had cracked it open like an otter cracks open a clam' had not been invented in a vacuum, after all. Mandrake had been utterly unable to eat shellfish. The very notion of it had made him sick to his stomach. When he'd grown up, he'd wondered where the injunction not to eat shellfish could have come from. A lot of people had believed that it had been a health thing, just as for pork. But a lot of things could be unhealthy. Why shellfish specifically?
Perhaps God had secretly been a mollusk Himself, Mandrake had speculated.
In any case, Mandrake had started refusing to wear mixed fibers as well. He had studied fabric to know it well enough to always have been able to tell when someone had been wearing mixed fabrics. He would never point it out in ordinary circumstances but, if a bigot had accused him of being someone who would go to hell because of his predilections, Mandrake had taken it upon himself to have been able to tell them which mixed fabrics they'd been wearing every time.
When he'd reached the end of high school, and the time had come for Mandrake to decide what to do with his life, his father had tried to influence him in the direction of becoming a psychologist himself, just as his father had been before him. Mandrake's father had been disappointed when Mandrake had chosen to become a scientist, both because he had wanted his son to follow in his own footsteps, and because he mistrusted scientists as an impious lot. For a long time, he'd claimed that Mandrake's pursuit of science had been nothing but the result of a psychological disturbance to get back at his father and at authority in general, out of spite.
Pushing himself further and further into unconventional, 'left-hand path' thinking, Mandrake had graduated until he had earned the highest degree in science that he could possibly have received. For a long time, he had become known as a respected scientist among his peers because of his intelligence. Mandrake really had pushed the envelope further than other scientists in a lot of ways, just as he had in terms of religion, mental health and sexuality, that had been the thing. After a few years, his research had become so controversial among his peers that his unorthodox ways had earned him the unflattering, hackneyed appellation of 'mad scientist.'
He'd put their criticisms out of his mind. Holy men had always been 'kadosh,' outcasts and pariahs. The average person had not been holy, so if one had been to be holy, one had to resolve not to be merely like the average person. He'd comforted himself with the words of Einstein, that men of brilliance had always encountered opposition from mediocre minds. The spirit of science, as he'd seen it, had been one of infinite discovery, not one to be circumscribed.
So one day he'd been almost devoured by a giant amoeba.
Apparently this had been the kind of thing that had happened. His body had become merged with the amoeba's. Mandrake had inadvertently become a shapeshifter. He could turn any part of his body, or even his entire body into water and back to flesh at will. It had not taken more effort for him to exist in a liquid state than in a solid state. He'd even been able to make his body evaporate and to condense himself back down to liquid then solid state without problem. It had taken him some measure of effort to execute complex water movements while shapeshifting, but no more than it would have taken the average gymnast to perform various acrobatics.
He had become able to split his own body in half like the Red Sea.
Many of his peers had taken this as a definite proof that everything bad that they had thought and said about Mandrake had been true, that he'd been a wild card so desperate to prove something and to appear original that he would have done literally anything to get attention for his research, even the unthinkable. For a moment, he'd accepted their verdict as true about him, and he'd developed a bit of a drinking problem as a result of his depression. More than anything he had been afraid that, when he would face his father having learned about what had happened to him, his father would say that it had proven everything bad he'd ever said about him as well.
This had not happened.
Instead, what his father had told him when Mandrake had faced him after having made the mistake that had turned him into a freak had been that the fact that he had been transformed into a shapeshifter had been just a fact. It had been merely an observation. For all he'd known, even though it had happened to him by accident, it could just as well have been the kind of thing that another researcher would have worked for their entire life in the hopes of achieving, without ever having been able to. What Mandrake's experience had meant about him had been something that had been for Mandrake and for Mandrake alone to determine, his father had told him.
This had been the most significant event that had made the otter's father earn his respect.
Mandrake had started going to a bar and nightclub called the Bolgia. He had heard about it because of his new condition. Apparently, it had developed a reputation as a place where the strangest of creatures could go, and find a place that would not make them feel like they hadn't belonged. He'd started making friends there with time. Mandrake had had a gentle personality and had loved listening to people.
The unusual kind of friends that he'd made at the Bolgia had had their own unique sets of problems because of their own conditions. Mandrake's father had been a single parent and, sometimes, Mandrake had felt as though he'd had to learn how to act as his own mother himself, giving himself advice and taking care of himself when his father would not. He'd fallen into the role of caretaker with his friends naturally, and many of them had developed the reflex of always turning to him whenever they'd had problems that they hadn't known how to deal with on their own. Sometimes Mandrake had felt challenged by them, and had looked for advice for himself.
Then it'd hit him. He'd become his friends' therapist!
At first he had been outraged. How had he allowed his life to maneuver him into a situation in which he had ended up becoming exactly what his father had wanted him to become even though he had never wanted to when he had been growing up? Yet at that point the alternative had become for him to act in a way that his friends would have experienced as him having stopped caring about their problems. They'd have felt horrible. He hadn't wanted that. Therefore, the only option that he had felt had remained open to him had been for him, on his own terms, in his own individualistic way, to embrace and study dreaded psychology after all.
Mandrake had soon realized that, despite psychology's Freudian roots, he had not been the only psychologist who had chosen to explore psychology in a way that had challenged societal norms rather than having merely reified them. When he'd learned that Jung had believed, even as long ago as he'd lived, that the job of a homosexual's psychologist had been to make sure that they were happy more than to convert them, and that the point of psychology had been to teach the individual to develop critical thinking skills about the collective to decondition themselves from social conditioning, he'd become a Jungian. He had never looked back since.
Mandrake had found Jung's approach to his patients' religion interesting. While most of psychology had tended to take either Christianity or atheism as default or 'normal' depending on whether the psychologist in question had been an atheist or a Christian himself, Jung had taken great care to encourage psychologists to meet their clients on their own terms. It would never be the job of a psychologist to make sure that their client had the 'right' religion. There had been no such thing.
Although Jung had been a Christian, he had never dismissed the religion of pagans as worthless. Instead, he had looked in it for some of the same social signifiers that had existed in monotheistic belief systems, while trying to 'translate' them from culture to culture. While he had become disenchanted with Kabbalah after having liked it as an imaginative journey as a child, partly because of its popularity in circles that had not taken spirituality seriously, Jung's approach to it had rekindled Mandrake's interest in it. Jung had believed that all of it, just as most belief systems, could also be seen as a useful set of psychological metaphors.
Every god had really been an expression of a specific part of someone's personality, on a very basic level, according to Jung. To worship the god of love was to honor the part of yourself that needed to feel love, and so on and so forth. Polytheism and perhaps religion in general had really been only giving names to the different parts of yourself to make sure that you wouldn't forget some of them that could be easy to forget but important to remember to take care of. No useful psychological advice could hinge on whether gods had existed or not. To be valid at all, it had to have been valid if the gods had been real, and valid if they had not been.
Mandrake had taken to this.
On a walk through the forest, Mandrake had met a man named Soma. Soma had been a snake, spider and dryad, all at once, who had used his knowledge of hedge witchcraft to work as a doctor. Trapped by his status as a dryad, Soma had been unable to leave the grove that he had lived in. People would come to him, or would bring wounded to him, and he would treat them. Soma hadn't believed in money, but as a dryad he'd needed a lot of favors, so he'd used barter to ask people to bring him things he'd needed from the outside world instead. Mandrake had related to Soma as a fellow healer that some people seemed to take for granted too much at times.
A dryad and an otter made of water had been a match made in heaven. Mandrake and Soma had become a happy couple quickly, and remained one to this day. They'd understood each other well enough, partly because of their considerable experience dealing with other people's problems, that they'd managed to avoid a lot of the problems that they'd known that many other couples had had to deal with. Mandrake hadn't minded that Soma had been poly, but he'd only had Soma himself. His clients kept him busy, and so many of his friends had also been his clients that it hadn't made him easy for him to date any of them, so as not to date his clients.
Soma had sometimes worried at the thought of asking Mandrake for help. He hadn't wanted to take advantage of the otter's training and to have started to date him only to become his client afterwards, as if he'd been looking for a loophole in the system. On a private, selfish level, though, Soma had found it refreshing that Mandrake could shapeshift the way he could. For one thing, it had meant that Soma himself would never have to fix up Mandrake.
When Mano, after her disillusioning time in the Middle East, had met Mandrake the Jewish otter and Rakim the Muslim bat at the Bolgia once she'd moved from Brazil to North America after all, and learned that they'd both been in a relationship with Soma without either of them having had a problem with it, she'd been weirdly moved to learn that they'd both have been willing to have made Soma's grove their shared, common ground...