Pricksongs & Descants

THE MAGIC POKER

I wander the island, inventing it. I make a sun for it, and trees— pines and birch and dogwood and firs — and cause the water to lap the pebbles of its abandoned shores. This, and more: I deposit shadows and dampness, spin webs, and scatter ruins. Yes: ruins. A mansion and guest cabins and boat houses and docks. Terraces, too, and bath houses and even an observation tower. All gutted and window-busted and autographed and shat upon. I impose a hot midday silence, a profound and heavy stillness. But anything can happen.

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This small and secretive bay, here just below what was once the caretaker’s cabin and not far from the main boat house, probably once possessed its own system of docks, built out to protect boats from the big rocks along the shore. At least the refuse — the long bony planks of gray lumber heaped up at one end of the bay— would suggest that. But aside from the planks, the bay is now only a bay, shallow, floored with rocks and cans and bottles. Schools of silver fish, thin as fingernails, fog the bottom, and dragonflies dart and hover over its placid surface. The harsh snarl of the boat motor — for indeed a boat has been approaching, coming in off the lake into this small bay — breaks off abruptly, as the boat carves a long gentle arc through the bay, and slides, scraping bottom, toward a shallow pebbly corner. There are two girls in the boat.

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Bedded deep in the grass, near the path up to the first guest cabin, lies a wrought-iron poker. It is long and slender with an intricately worked handle, and it is orange with rust. It lies shadowed, not by trees, but by the grass that has grown up wildly around it. I put it there.

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The caretaker’s son, left behind when the island was deserted, crouches naked in the brambly fringe of the forest overlooking the bay. He watches, scratching himself, as the boat scrapes to a stop and the girls stand — then he scampers through the trees and bushes to the guest cabin.

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The girl standing forward — fashionbook-trim in tight gold pants, ruffled blouse, silk neckscarf — hesitates, makes one false start, then jumps from the boat, her sandaled heel catching the water’s edge. She utters a short irritable cry, hops up on a rock, stumbles, lands finally in dry weeds on the other side. She turns her heel up and frowns down over her shoulder at it. Tiny muscles in front of her ears tense and ripple. She brushes anxiously at a thick black fly in front of her face, and asks peevishly: “What do I do now, Karen?”

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I arrange the guest cabin. I rot the porch and tatter the screen door and infest the walls. I tear out the light switches, gut the mattresses, smash the windows, and shit on the bathroom floor. I rust the pipes, kick in the papered walls, unhinge doors. Really, there’s nothing to it. In fact, it’s a pleasure.

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Once, earlier in this age, a family with great wealth purchased this entire island, here up on the border, and built on it all these houses, these cabins and the mansion up there on the promontory, and the boat house, docks, bath houses, observation tower. They tamed the island some, seeded lawn grass, contrived their own sewage system with indoor appurtenances, generated electricity for the rooms inside and for the Japanese lanterns and postamps without, and they came up here from time to time in the summers. They used to maintain a caretaker on the island year round, housed him in the cabin by the boat house, but then the patriarch of the family died, and the rest had other things to do. They stopped coming to the island and forgot about caretaking.

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The one in gold pants watches as the girl still in the boat switches the motor into neutral and upends it, picks up a yellowish-gray rope from the bottom, and tosses it ashore to her. She reaches for it straight-armed, then shies from it, letting it fall to the ground. She takes it up with two fingers and a thumb and holds it out in front of her. The other girl, Karen (she wears a light yellow dress with a beige cardigan over it), pushes a toolkit under a seat, gazes thoughtfully about the boat, then jumps out. Her canvas shoes splash in the water’s edge, but she pays no notice. She takes the rope from the girl in gold pants, loops it around a birch near the shore, smiles warmly, and then, with a nod, leads the way up the path.

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At the main house, the mansion, there is a kind of veranda or terrace, a balcony of sorts, high out on the promontory, offering a spectacular view o£ the lake with its wide interconnected expanses of blue and its many islands. Poised there now, gazing thoughtfully out on that view, is a tall slender man, dressed in slacks, white turtleneck shirt, and navy-blue jacket, smoking a pipe, leaning against the stone parapet. Has he heard a boat come to the island? He is unsure. The sound of the motor seemed to diminish, to grow more distant, before it stopped. Yet, on water, especially around islands, one can never trust what he hears.

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Also this, then: the mansion with its many rooms, its debris, its fireplaces and wasps’ nests, its musty basement, its grand hexagonal loggia and bright red doors. Though the two girls will not come here for a whiles — first, they have the guest cabin to explore, the poker to find — I have been busy. In the loggia, I have placed a green piano. I have pulled out its wires, chipped and yellowed its ivory keys, and cracked its green paint. I am nothing if not thorough, a real stickler for detail. I have dismembered the piano’s pedals and dropped an old boot in its body (this, too, I’ve designed: it is horizontal and harp-shaped). The broken wires hang like rusted hairs.

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The caretaker’s son watches for their approach through a shattered window of the guest cabin. He is stout and hairy, muscular, dark, with short bowed legs and a rounded spiny back. The hair on his head is long, and a thin young beard sprouts on his chin and upper lip. His genitals hang thick and heavy and his buttocks are shaggy. His small eyes dart to and fro: where are they?

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In the bay, the sun’s light has been constant and oppressive; along the path, it is mottled and varied. Even in this variety, though, there is a kind of monotony, a determined patterning that wants a good wind. Through these patterns move the two girls, Karen long-striding with soft steps and expectant smile, the other girl hurrying behind, halting, hurrying again, slapping her arms, her legs, the back of her neck, cursing plaintively. Each time she passes between the two trees, the girl in pants stops, claws the space with her hands, runs through, but spiderwebs keep diving and tangling into her hair just the same.

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Between two trees on the path, a large spider — black with a red heart on its abdomen — weaves an intricate web. The girl stops short, terrified. Nimbly, the shiny black creature works, as though spelling out some terrible message for her alone. How did Karen pass through here without brushing into it? The girl takes a step back ward, holding her hands to her face. Which way around? To the left it is dark, to the right sunny: she chooses the sunny side and there, not far from the path, comes upon a wrought-iron poker, long and slender with an intricately worked handle. She bends low, her golden haunches gleaming over the grass: how beautiful it isl On a strange impulse, she kisses-it — poof I before her stands a tall slender man, handsome, dressed in dark slacks, white turtleneck shirt, and jacket, smoking a pipe. He smiles down at her. “Thank you,” he says, and takes her hand.

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Karen is some distance in front, almost out of sight, when the other girl discovers, bedded in the grass, a wrought-iron poker. Orange with rust, it is long and slender with an elaborate handle. She crouches to examine it, her haunches curving golden above the bluegrcen grass, her long black hair drifting lightly down over her small shoulders and wafting in front of her fineboned face. “OhI” she says softly. “How strange! How bcautifull” Squeamishly, she touches it, grips it, picks it up, turns it over. Not so rusty on the underside — but bugs! millions of them! She drops the thing, shud ders, stands, wipes her hand several times on her pants, shudders again. A few steps away, she pauses, glances back, then around at everything about her, concentrating, memorizing the place probably. She hurries on up the path and sees her sister already at the first guest cabin.

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The girl in gold pants? yes. The other one, Karen? also. In fact, they are sisters. I have brought two sisters to this invented island, and shall, in time, send them home again. I have dressed them and may well choose to undress them. I have given one three marriages, the other none at all, nor is that the end of my beneficence and cruelty. It might even be argued that I have invented their common parents. No, I have not. We have options that may, I admit, seem strangely limited to some…

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She crouches, haunches flexing golden above the bluegreen grass, and kisses the strange poker, kisses its handle and its long rusted shaft. Nothing. Only a harsh unpleasant taste. I am a fool, she thinks, a silly romantic fool. Yet why else has she been diverted to this small meadow? She kisses the tip — poof! “Thank you,” he says, smiling down at her. He bows to kiss her check and take her hand.

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The guest cabin is built of rough-hewn logs, hardly the fruit of necessity, given the funds at hand, but probably it was thought fashionable; proof of traffic with other cultures is adequately provided by its gabled roof and log columns. It is here, on the shaded porch, where Karen is standing, waiting for her sister. Karen waves when she sees her, ducking down there along the path; then she turns and enters the cabin through the broken front door.

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He knows that one. He’s been there before. He crouches inside the door, his hairy body tense. She enters, staring straight at him. He grunts. She smiles, backing away. “Karen!” His small eyes dart to the doorway, and he shrinks back into the shadows.

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She kisses the rusted iron poker, kisses its ornate handle, its long rusted shaft, kisses the tip. Nothing happens. Only a rotten taste in her mouth. Something is wrong. “Karen!”

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“Karen!” the girl in pants calls from outside the guest cabin. “Karen, I just found the most beautiful thing!” The second step of the porch is rotted away. She hops over it onto the porch, drags open the tattered screen door. “Karen, I—oh, good God! look what they’ve done to this house! Just look!” Karen, about to enter the kitchen, turns back, smiling, as her sister surveys the room: “The walls all smashed in, even the plugs in the wall and the light switches pulled out! Think of it, Karen! They even had electricity! Out here on this island, so far from everything civilized! And, see, what beautiful paper they had on the walls! And now just look at it! It’s so — oh! what a dreadful beautiful beastly thing all at once!”

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But where is the caretaker’s son? I don’t know. He was here, shrinking into the shadows, when Karen’s sister entered. Yet, though she catalogues the room’s disrepair, there is no mention of the care taker’s son. This is awkward. Didn’t I invent him myself, along with the girls and the man in the turtlencck shirt? Didn’t I round his back and stunt his legs and cause the hair to hang between his buttocks? I don’t know. The girls, yes, and the tall man in the shirt — to be sure, he’s one of the first of my inventions. But the caretaker’s son? To tell the truth, I sometimes wonder if it was not he who invented me…

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The caretaker’s son, genitals hanging hard and heavy, eyes aglitter, shrinks back into the shadows as the girl approaches, and then goes bounding silently into the empty rooms. Behind an unhinged door, he peeks stealthily at the declaiming girl in gold pants, then slips, almost instinctively, into the bathroom to hide. It was here, after all, where first they met.

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Karen passes quietly through the house, as though familiar with it. In the kitchen, she picks up a chipped blue teakettle, peers inside. All rust. She thumps it, the sound is dull. She sets it on a bench in the sunlight. On all sides, there are broken things: rubble really. Windows gape, shards of glass in the edges pointing out the middle spaces. The mattresses on the floors have been slashed with knives. What little there is of wood is warped. The girl in the tight gold pants and silk neckscarf moves, chattering, in and out of rooms. She opens a white door, steps into a bathroom, steps quickly out again. “Judas Godl” she gasps, clearly horrified. Karen turns, eyebrows raised in concern. “Don’t go in there, Karen! Don’t go in there!” She clutches one hand to her ruffled blouse. “About a hundred million people have gone to the bathroom in there!” Exiting the bathroom behind her, a lone fly swims lazily past her elbow into the close warm air of the kitchen. It circles over a cracked table — the table bearing newspapers, shreds of wallpaper, tin cans, a stiff black washcloth — then settles on a counter near a rusted pipeless sink. It chafes its rear legs, walks past the blue teakettle’s shadow into a band of pure sunlight stretched out along the counter, and sits there.

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The tall man stands, one foot up on the stone parapet, gazing out on the blue sunlit lake, drawing meditatively on his pipe. He has been deeply moved by the desolation of this island. And yet, it is only the desolation of artifact, is it not, the ruin of man’s civilized arrogance, nature reclaiming her own. Even the willful mutilations: a kind of instinctive response to the futile artifices of imposed order, after all. But such reasoning does not appease him. Leaning against his raised knee, staring out upon the vast wilderness, hoping indeed he has heard a boat come here, he puffs vigorously on his pipe and affirms reason, man, order. Are we merely blind brutes loosed in a system of mindless energy, impotent, misdirected, and insolent? “No,” he says aloud, “we are not.”

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She peeks into the bathroom; yes, he is in there, crouching obscurely, shaggily, but eyes aglitter, behind the stool. She hears his urgent grunt and smiles. “Oh, Karen!” cries the other girl from the rear of the house. “It’s so very sad!” Hastily, Karen steps out into the hallway, eases the bathroom door shut, her heart pounding.

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“Oh, Karen, it’s so very sad!” That’s the girl in the gold pants again, of course. Now she is gazing out a window. At: high weeds and grass, crowding young birches, red rattan chair with the seat smashed out, backdrop of gray-trunked pines. She is thinking of her three wrecked marriages, her affairs, and her desolation of spirit. The broken rattan chair somehow communicates to her a sensation of real physical pain. Where have all the Princes gone? she wonders. “I mean, it’s not the ones who stole the things, you know, the scavengers. I’ve seen people in Paris and Mexico and Algiers, lots of places, scooping rotten oranges and fishheads out of the heaped-up gutters and eating them, and I didn’t blame them, I didn’t dislike them, I felt sorry for them. I even felt sorry for them if they were just doing it to be stealing something, to get something for nothing, even if they weren’t hungry or anything. But it isn’t the people who look for things they want or need or even don’t need and take them, it’s the people who just destroy, destroy because — God! because they just want to destroy! Lust! That’s all, Karen! See? Somebody just went around these rooms driving his fist in the walls because he had to hurt, it didn’t matter who or what, or maybe he kicked them with his feet, and bashed the windows and ripped the curtains and then went to the bathroom on it all! Oh my God! Why? Why would anybody want to do that?” The window in front of Karen (she has long since turned her back) is, but for one panel, still whole. In the excepted panel, the rupture in the glass is now spanned by a spiderweb more intricate than a butterfly’s wing, than a system of stars, its silver paths seeming to imitate or perhaps merely to extend the delicate tracery of the fractured glass still surrounding the hole. It is a new web, for nothing has entered it yet to alter its original construction. Karen’s hand reaches toward it, but then withdraws. “Karen, let’s get out of here!”

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The girls have gone. The caretaker’s son bounds about the guest cabin, holding himself with one hand, smashing walls and busting windows with the other, grunting happily as he goes. He leaps up onto the kitchen counter, watches the two girls from the window, as they wind their way up to the main mansion, then squats joyfully over the blue teakettle, depositing… a love letter, so to speak.

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A love letter! Wait a minute, this is getting out of hand! What happened to that poker, I was doing much better with the poker, I had something going there, archetypal and even maybe beautiful, a blend of eros and wisdom, sex and sensibility, music and myth. But what am I going to do with shit in a rusty teakettle? No, no, there’s nothing to be gained by burdening our fabrications with impieties. Enough that the skin of the world is Uttered with our contentious artifice, lepered with the stigmata of human aggression and despair, without suffering our songs to be flatted by savagery. Back to the poker.

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“Thank you,” he says, smiling down at her, her haunches gleaming golden over the shadowed grass. “But, tell me, how did you know to kiss it?” “Call it woman’s intuition,” she replies, laughing lightly, and rises with an appreciative glance. “But the neglected state that it was in, it must have tasted simply dreadful,” he apologizes, and kisses her gently on the cheek. “What momentary bitterness I might have suffered,” she responds, “has been more than indemnified by the sweetness of your disenchantment.” “My disenchantment? Oh no, my dear, there are no disenchantments, merely progressions and styles of possession. To exist is to be spell-bound.” She collapses, marveling, at his feet.

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Karen, alone on the path to the mansion, pauses. Where is her sister? Has something distracted her? Has she strayed? Perhaps she has gone on ahead. Well, it hardly matters, what can happen on a desolate island? they’ll meet soon enough at the mansion. In fact, Karen isn’t even thinking about her sister, she’s staring silently, entranced, at a small green snake, stretched across the path. Is it dozing? Or simply unafraid? Maybe it’s never seen a real person before, doesn’t know what people can do. It’s possible: few people come here now, and it looks like a very young snake. Slender, wriggly, green, and shiny. No, probably it’s asleep. Smiling, Karen leaves the path, circling away from the snake so as not to disturb it. To the right of the path is a small clearing and the sun is hot there; to the left it is cool and shadowed in the gathering forest. Karen moves that way, in under the trees, picking the flowers that grow wildly here. Her cardigan catches on brambles and birch seedlings, so she pulls it off, tosses it loosely over her shoulder, hooked on one finger. She hears, not far away, a sound not unlike soft footfalls. Curious, she wanders that way to see who or what it is.

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The path up to the main house, the mansion, is not even mottled, the sun does not reach back here at all, it is dark and damp-smelling, an ambience of mushrooms and crickets and fingery rustles and dead brown leaves never quite dry, or so it might seem to the girl in gold pants, were she to come this way. Where is she? His small eyes dart to and fro. Here, beside the path, trees have collapsed and rotted, seedlings and underbrush have sprung up, and lichens have crept softly over all surfaces, alive and dead. Strange creatures abide here.

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“Call it woman’s intuition,” she says with a light laugh. He appraises her fineboncd features, her delicate hands, her soft maidenly breasts under the ruffled blouse, her firm haunches gleaming golden over the shadowed grass. He pulls her gently to her feet, kisses her check. “You are enchantingly beautiful, my dear,” he whispers. “Wouldn’t you like to lie with me here awhile?” “Of course,” she replies, and kisses his cheek in return, “but these pants arc an awful bother to remove, and my sister awaits us. Cornel Let us go up to the mansion!”

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A small green snake lies motionless across the path. The girl approaching does not sec it, sees only the insects flicking damply, the girl in tight pants which are still golden here in the deep shadows. Her hand flutters ceaselessly before her face, it was surely the bugs that drove these people away from here finally, “Karen, is this the right way?”, and she very nearly walks right on the snake, which has perhaps been dozing, but which now switches with a frantic whip of its shiny green tail off into the damp leaves. The girl starts at the sudden whirring shush at her feet, spins around clutching her hands to her upper arms, expecting the worst, but though staring wide-eyed right at the sound, she can see nothing. Why did she ever let her sister talk her into coming here? “Karen!” She runs, ignoring the webs now, right through all the gnats and flies, on up the path, crying out her sister’s name.

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The caretaker’s son, poised gingerly on a moss-covered rock, peeking through thick branches, watches the girl come up the path. Karen watches the caretaker’s son. From the rear, his prominent feature is his back, broad and rounded, humped almost, where tufts of dark hair sprout randomly. His head is just a small hairy lump beyond the mound of heavy back. His arms are as long as his legs arc short, and the elbows, like the knees, turn outward. Thick hair grows between his buttocks and down his thighs. Smiling, she picks up a pebble to toss at him, but then she hears her sister call her name.

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Leaning against his raised knee, smoking his pipe, the tall man on the parapet stares out on the wilderness, contemplating the island’s ruin. Trees have collapsed upon one another, and vast areas of the island, once cleared and no doubt the stage for garden parties famous for miles around, are now virtually impassable. Brambles and bunchberries grow wildly amid saxifrage and shinleaf, and everything in sight is mottled with moss. Lichens: the symbiotic union, he recalls, of fungi and algae. He smiles and at the same moment, as though it has been brought into being by his smile, hears a voice on the garden path. A girl. How charming, he’s to have company, after all! At least two, for he heard the voice on the path behind the mansion, and below him, slipping surefootedly through the trees and bushes, moves another creature in a yellow dress, carrying a beige sweater over her shoulder. She looks a little simple, not his type really, but then dissimilar organisms can, at times, enjoy mutually advantageous partnerships, can they not? He knocks the ashes from his pipe and refills the bowl.

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At times, I forget that this arrangement is my own invention. I begin to think of the island as somehow real, its objects solid and intractable, its condition of ruin not so much an aesthetic design as an historical denouement. I find myself peering into blue teakettles, batting at spiderwebs, and contemplating a greenish-gray growth on the side of a stone parapet. I wonder if others might wander here without my knowing it; I wonder if I might die and the teakettle remain. “I have brought two sisters to this invented island,” I say. This is no extravagance. It is indeed I who burdens them with curiosity and history, appetite and rhetoric. If they have names and griefs, I have provided them. “In fact,” I add, “without me they’d have no cunts.” This is not (I interrupt here to tell you that I have done all that I shall do. I return here to bring you this news, since this seemed as good a place as any. Though you have more to face, and even more to suffer from me, this is in fact the last thing I shall say to you. But can the end be in the middle? Yes, yes, it always is…) meant to alarm, merely to make a truth manifest — yet / am myself somewhat alarmed. It is one thing to discover the shag of hair between my buttocks, quite another to find myself tugging the tight gold pants off Karen’s sister. Or perhaps it is the same thing, yet troubling in either case. Where does this illusion come from, this sensation of “hardness” in a blue teakettle or an iron poker, golden haunches or a green piano?

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In the hexagonal loggia of the mansion stands a grand piano, painted bright green, though chipped and cracked now with age and abuse. One can easily imagine a child at such a piano, a piano so glad and ready, perhaps two children, and the sun is shining — no, rather, there is a storm on the lake, the sky is in a fury, all black and pitching, the children are inside here out of the wind and storm, the little girl on the right, the boy on the left, pushing at each other a bit, staking out property lines on the keys, a grandmother, or perhaps just a lady, yet why not a grandmother? sitting on a window-bench gazing out on the frothy blue-black lake, and the children are playing “Chopsticks,” laughing, a little noisy surely, and the grandmother, or lady, looks over from time to time, forms a patient smile if they chance to glance up at her, then — well, but it’s only a supposition, who knows whether there were children or if they cared a damn about a green piano even on a bad day, “Chopsticks” least of all? No, it’s only a piece of fancy, the kind of fancy that is passing through the mind of the girl in gold pants who now reaches down, strikes a key. There is no sound, of course. The ivory is chipped and yellowed, the pedals dismembered, the wires torn out and hanging like rusted hairs. The girl wonders at her own unkemptness, feels a lock loose on her forehead, but there are no mirrors. Stolen or broken. She stares about her, nostalgically absorbed for some reason, at the elegantly timbered roof of the loggia, at the enormous stone fireplace, at the old shoe in the doorway, the wasps’ nests over one broken-out window. She sighs, steps out on the terrace, steep and proud over the lake. “It’s a sad place,” she says aloud.

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The tall man in the navy-blue jacket stands, one foot up on the stone parapet, gazing out on the blue sunlit lake, drawing meditatively on his pipe, while being sketched by the girl in the tight gold pants. “I somehow expected to find you here,” she says. “I’ve been waiting for you,” replies the man. Her three-quarters view o£ him from the rear allows her to include only the tip of his nose in her sketch, the edge of his pipebowl, the collar of his white turtleneck shirt. “I was afraid there might be others,” she says. “Others?” “Yes. Children perhaps. Or somebody’s grandmother. I saw so many names everywhere I went, on walls and doors and trees and even scratched into that green piano.” She is carefully filling in on her sketch the dark contours of his navy-blue jacket. “No,” he says, “whoever they were, they left here long ago.” “It’s a sad place,” she says, “and all too much like my own life.” He nods. “You mean, the losing struggle against inscrutable blind forces, young dreams brought to ruin?” “Yes, something like that,” she says. “And getting kicked in and gutted and shat upon.” “Mmm.” He straightens. “Just a moment,” she says, and he resumes his pose. The girl has accomplished a reasonable likeness of the tall man, except that his legs arc stubby (perhaps she failed to center her drawing properly, and ran out of space at the bottom of the paper) and his buttocks are bare and shaggy.

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“It’s a sad place,” he says, contemplating the vast wilderness. He turns to find her grinning and wiggling her ears at him. “Karen, you’re mocking me!” he complains, laughing. She props one foot up on the stone parapet, leans against her leg, sticks an iron poker between her teeth, and scowls out upon the lake. “Come on I Stop it!” he laughs. She puffs on the iron poker, blowing imaginary smoke-rings, then turns it into a walking stick and hobbles about imitating an old granny chasing young children. Next, she puts the poker to her shoulder like a rifle and conducts an inspection of all the broken windows facing on the terrace, scowling or weeping broadly before each one. The man has slumped to the terrace floor, doubled up with laughter. Suddenly, Karen discovers an unbroken window. She leaps up and down, does a somersault, pirouettes, jumps up and clicks her heels together. She points at it, kisses it, points again. “Yes, yes!” the man laughs, “I see it, Karen!” She points to herself, then at the window, to herself again. “You? You’re like the window, Karen?” he asks, puzzled, but still laughing. She nods her head vigorously, thrusts the iron poker into his hands. It is dirty and rusty and he feels clumsy with the thing. “I don’t understand…” She grabs it out of his hands and — crash! — drives it through the window. “Oh no, Karen! No, no…!”

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“It’s a sad place.” Karen has joined her sister on the terrace, the balcony, and they gaze out at the lake, two girls alone on a desolate island. “Sad and yet all too right for me, I suppose. Oh, I don’t regret any of it, Karen. No, I was wrong, wrong as always, but I don’t regret it. It’d be silly to be all pinched and morbid about it, wouldn’t it, Karen?” The girl, of course, is talking about the failure of her third marriage. “Things are done and they are undone and then we get ready to do them again.” Karen looks at her shyly, then turns her gentle gaze back out across the lake, blue with a river’s muted blue under this afternoon sun. “The sun!” the girl in gold pants exclaims, though it is not clear why she thought of it. She tries to explain that she is like the sun somehow, or the sun is like her, but she becomes confused. Finally, she interrupts herself to blurt out: “Oh, Karen! I’m so miserable!” Karen looks up anxiously: there are no tears in her sister’s eyes, but she is biting down pain fully on her lower lip. Karen offers a smile, a little awkward, not quite understanding perhaps, and finally her sister, eyes closing a moment, then fluttering open, smiles wanly in return. A moment of grace settles between them, but Karen turns her back on it clumsily.

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“No, Karen! Please! Stop!” The man, collapsed to the terrace floor, has tears of laughter running down his cheeks. Karen has found an old shoe and is now holding it up at arm’s length, making broad silent motions with her upper torso and free arm as though declaiming upon the sadness of the shoe. She sets the shoe on the terrace floor and squats down over it, covering it with the skirt of her yellow dress. “No, Karen! No!” She leaps up, whacks her heels together in midair, picks up the shoe and peers inside. A broad smile spreads across her face, and she does a little dance, holding the shoe aloft. With a little curtsy, she presents the shoe to the man. “No! Please!” Warily, but still laughing, he looks inside. “What’s this? Oh no! A flower! Karen, this is too much!” She runs into the mansion, returns carrying the green piano on her back. She drops it so hard, one leg breaks off. She finds an iron poker, props the piano up with it, sits down on an imaginary stool to play. She lifts her hands high over her head, then comes driving down with extravagant magisterial gestures. The piano, of course, has been completely disemboweled, so no sounds emerge, but up and down the broken keyboard Karen’s stubby fingers fly, arriving at last, with a crescendo of violent flourishes, at a grand climactic coda, which she delivers with such force as to buckle the two remaining legs of the piano and send it all crashing to the terrace floor. “No, Karen! Oh my God!” Out of the wreckage, a wild goose springs, honking in holy terror, and goes flapping out over the lake. Karen carries the piano back inside, there’s a splintering crash, and she returns wielding the poker. “Careful!” She holds the poker up with two hands and does a little dance, toes turned outward, hippety-hopping about the terrace. She stops abruptly over the man, thrusts the poker in front of his nose, then slowly brings it to her own lips and kisses it. She makes a wry face. “Oh, Karen! Whoo! Please! You’re killing me!” She kisses the handle, the shaft, the tip. She wrinkles her nose and shudders, lifts her skirt and wipes her tongue with it. She scowls at the poker. She takes a firm grip on the poking end and bats the handle a couple times against the stone parapet as though testing it. “Oh, Karen! Oh!” Then she lifts it high over her head and brings it down with all her might — wham! — poof! it is the caretaker’s son, yowling’ with pain. She lets go and spins away from him, as he strikes out at her in distress and fury. She tumbles into a corner of the terrace and cowers there, whimpering, pale and terrified, as the caretaker’s son, breathing heavily, back stooped and buttocks tensed, circles her, prepared to spring. Suddenly, she dashes for the parapet and leaps over, the caretaker’s son bounding after, and off they go, scrambling frantically through the trees and brambles, leaving the tall man in the white turtleneck shirt alone and limp from laughter on the terrace.

○ ○ ○

There is a storm on the lake. Two children play “Chopsticks” on the green piano. Their grandmother stirs the embers in the fireplace with an iron poker, then returns to her seat on the window-bench. The children glance over at her and she smiles at them. Suddenly a strange naked creature comes bounding into the loggia, grinning idiotically. The children and their grandmother scream with terror and race from the room and on out of the mansion, running for their lives. The visitor leaps up on the piano bench and squats there, staring quizzically at the ivory keys. He reaches for one and it sounds a note — he jerks his hand back in fright. He reaches for another — a different note. He brings his fist down — blam! Aha! Again: blam! Excitedly, he leaps up and down on the piano bench, banging his fists on the piano keyboard. He hops up on the piano, finds wires inside, and pulls them out. twang! twang! He holds his genitals with one hand and rips out the wires with the other, grunting with delight. Then he spies the iron poker. He grabs it up, admires it, then bounds joyfully around the room, smashing win dows and wrecking furniture. The girl in gold pants enters and takes the poker away from him. “Lust! That’s all it is!” she scolds. She whacks him on the nates with the poker, and, yelping with pain and astonishment, he bounds away, leaping over the stone parapet, and slinks off through the brambly forest.

○ ○ ○

“Lust!” she says, “that’s all it is!” Her sketch is nearly complete. “And they’re not the worst ones. The worst ones are the ones who just let it happen. I£ they’d kept their caretaker here…” The man smiles. “There never was a caretaker,” he explains. “Really? But I thought—!” “No,” he says, “that’s just a legend of the island.” She seems taken aback by this new knowledge. “Then… then I don’t understand…” He relights his pipe, wanders over to appraise her sketch. He laughs when he sees the shaggy buttocks. “Marvelous!” he exclaims, “but a poor likeness, I’m afraid! Look!” He lowers his dark slacks and show her his hind-end, smooth as marble and hair less as a movie starlet’s. Her curiosity is caught, however, not by his barbered buttocks, but by the hair around his genitals: the tight neat curls fan out in both directions like the wings of an eagle, or a wild goose…

○ ○ ○

The two sisters return to the loggia, their visit nearly concluded, the one in gold pants still trying to explain about herself and the sun, about consuming herself with an outer fire, while harboring an ice-cold center within. Her gaze falls once more on the green piano. It is obvious she still has something-more to say. But now as she declaims, she has less of an audience. Karen stands distractedly before the green piano. Haltingly, she lifts a finger, strikes a key. No note, only a dull thuck. Her sister reveals a new insight she has just obtained about it not being the people who steal or even those who wantonly destroy, but those who let it happen, who just don’t give a proper damn. She provides instances. Once, Karen nods, but maybe only at something she has thought to herself. Her finger lifts, strikes. Thuck! Again. Thuck! Her whole arm drives the strong blunt finger. Thuck! Thuck! There is something genuinely beautiful about the girl in gold pants and silk neck-scarf as she gestures and speaks. Her eyes are sorrowful and wise. Thuck! Karen strikes the key. Suddenly, her sister breaks off her message. “Oh, I’m sorry, Karen!” she says. She stares at the piano, then runs out of the room.

○ ○ ○

I am disappearing. You have no doubt noticed. Yes, and by some no doubt calculable formula of event and pagination. But before we drift apart to a distance beyond the reach of confessions (though I warn you: like Zeno’s turtle, I am with you always), listen: it’s just as I feared, my invented island is really taking its place in world geography. Why, this island sounds very much like the old Dahlberg place on Jackfish Island up on Rainy Lake, people say, and I wonder: can it be happening? Someone tells me: I understand somebody bought the place recently and plans to fix it up, maybe put a resort there or something. On my island? Extraordinary! — and yet it seems possible. I look on a map: yes, there’s Rainy Lake, there’s Jackfish Island. Who invented this map? Well, I must have, surely. And the Dahlbergs, too, of course, and the people who told me about them. Yes, and perhaps tomorrow I will invent Chicago and Jesus Christ and the history of the moon. Just as I have in vented you, dear reader, while lying here in the afternoon sun, bedded deeply in the bluegreen grass like an old iron poker…

○ ○? ○

There is a storm on the lake and the water is frothy and black. The wind howls around the corner of the stone parapet and the pine trees shake and creak. The two children playing “Chopsticks” on the green piano arc arguing about the jurisdiction of the bench and keyboard. “Come over here,” their grandmother says from her seat by the window, “and I’ll tell you the story of ‘The Magic Poker’…”

○ ○? ○

Once upon a time, a family of wealthy Minnesotans bought an island on Rainy Lake up on the Canadian border. They built a home on it and guest cabins and boat houses and an observation tower. They installed an electric generator and a sewage system with indoor toilets, maintained a caretaker, and constructed docks and bath houses. Did they name it Jackfish Island, or did it bear that name when they bought it? The legend does not say, nor should it. What it does say, however, is that when the family abandoned the island, they left behind an iron poker, which, years later, on a visit to the island, a beautiful young girl, not quite a princess perhaps, yet altogether equal to the occasion, kissed. And when she did so, something quite extraordinary happened…

Once upon a time there was an island visited by ruin and inhabited by strange woodland creatures. Some thought it had once had a caretaker who had either died or found another job elsewhere. Others said, no, there was never a caretaker, that was only a childish legend. Others believed there was indeed a caretaker and he lived there yet and was in fact responsible for the island’s tragic condition. All this is neither here nor there. What is certainly beyond dispute is that no one who visited the island, whether searching for its legendary Magic Poker or avenging the loss of a loved one, ever came back. Only their names were left, inscribed hastily on walls and ceilings and carved on trees.

○ ○? ○

Once upon a time, two sisters visited a desolate island. They walked its paths with their proclivities and scruples, dreaming their dreams and sorrowing their sorrows. They scared a snake and probably a bird or two, broke a few windows (there were few left to break), and gazed meditatively out upon the lake from the terrace of the main house. They wrote their names above the stone fireplace in the hexagonal loggia and shat in the soundbox of an old green piano. One of them did anyway; the other one couldn’t get her pants down. On the island, they found a beautiful iron poker, and when they went home, they took it with them.

○ ○? ○

The girl in gold pants hastens out of the big house and down the dark path where earlier the snake slept and past the gutted guest cabin and on down the mottled path toward the boat. To either side of her, flies and bees mumble indolently under the summer sun. A small speckled frog who will not live out the day squats staring on a stone, burps, hops into a darkness. A white moth drifts silently into the web of a spider, flutters there awhile before his execution. Suddenly, there on the path mottled with sunlight, the girl stops short, her breath coming in short gasps, looking around her. Wasn’t this—? Yes, yes, it is the place! A smile begins to form. And in fact, there it is! She waits for Karen. \

○ ○? ○

Once upon a time there was a beautiful young Princess in tight gold pants, so very tight in fact that no one could remove them from her. Knights came from far and wide, and they huffed and they puffed, and they grunted and they groaned, but the pants would not come down. One rash Knight even went so far as to jam the blade of his sword down the front of the gold pants, striving to pry them from her, but he succeeded only in shattering his sword, much to his lifelong dismay and ignominy. The King at last delivered a Proclamation. “Whosoever shall succeed in pulling my daughter’s pants down,” he declared, “shall have her for his bride!” Since this was perhaps not the most tempting of trophies, the Princess having been married off three times already in previous competitions, the King added: “And moreover he shall have bestowed upon him the Magic Poker, whose powers and prodigies are well-known in the Kingdom!” “The Old Man’s got his bloody cart before his horse,” one Knight complained sourly to a companion upon hearing the Proclamation. “If I had the bloody Poker, you could damn well bet I’d have no trouble gettin’ the bloody pants off her!” Now, it chanced that this heedless remark was overheard by a peculiar little gnome-like creature, huddling naked and unshaven in the brush alongside the road, and no sooner had the words been uttered than this strange fellow determined to steal the Magic Poker and win the beauty for himself. Such an enterprise might well have seemed impossible for even the most dauntless of Knights, much less for so hapless a creature as this poor naked brute with the shaggy loins, but the truth, always stranger than fiction, was that his father had once been the King’s Official Caretaker, and the son had grown up among the mysteries and secret chambers of the Court. Imagine the entire Kingdom’s astonishment, therefore, when, the very next day, the Caretaker’s son appeared, squat, naked, and hirsute, before the King and with grunts and broad gestures made manifest his intention to quit the Princess of her pants and win the prizes for himself I “Indeed!” cried her father. The King’s laughter boomed throughout the Palace, and all the Knights and Ladies joined in, creating the jolliest of uproars. “Bring my daughter here at once!” the King thundered, delighted by the droll spectacle. The Princess, amused, but at the same time somewhat afrighted of the strange little man, stepped timidly forward, her golden haunches gleaming in the bright lights of the Palace. The Caretaker’s son promptly drew forth the Magic Poker, pointed it at the Princess, and — poof! — the gold pants dropped — plop! — to the Palace floor. “Oh’s!” and “Ah’s!” of amazement and admiration rose up in excited chorus from the crowd of nobles attending this most extraordinary moment. Flushed, trembling, impatient, the Princess grasped the Magic Poker and kissed it — poof! — a handsome Knight in shining armor of white and navy blue stood before her, smoking a pipe. He drew his sword and slew the Caretaker’s son. Then, smiling at the maiden standing in her puddle of gold pants, he sheathed his sword, knocked the ashes from his pipe bowl, and knelt before the King. “Your Majesty,” he said, “I have slain the monster and rescued your daughter!” “Not at all,” replied the King gloomily. “You have made her a widow. Kiss the fool, my dear!” “No, please!” the Knight begged. “Stop!”

○ ○? ○

“Look, Karen, look! See what I found! Do you think we can take it? It doesn’t hurt, does it, I mean, what with everything else—? It’s just beautiful and I can scour off the rust and—?” Karen glances at the poker in the grass, shrugs, smiles in assent, turns to stride on down the rise toward the boat, a small white edge of which can be glimpsed through the trees, below, at the end of the path. “Karen—? Could you please—?” Karen turns around, gazes quizzically at her sister, head tilted to one side — then laughs, a low grunting sound, something like a half-gargle, walks back and picks up the poker, brushes off the insects with her hand. Her sister, delighted, reaches for it, but Karen grunts again, keeps it, carries it down to their boat. There, she washes it clean in the lake water, scrubbing it with sand. She dries it on her dress. “Don’t get your dress dirty, Karen! It’s rusty anyway. We’ll clean it when we get home.” Karen holds it between them a moment before tossing it into the boat, and they both smile to see it. Wet still, it glistens, sparkling with flecks of rainbow-colored light in the sunshine.

○ ○? ○

The tall man stands poised before her, smoking his pipe, one hand in the pocket of his navy-blue jacket. Besides the jacket, he wears only a white turtleneck shirt. The girl in gold pants is kissing him. From the tip of his crown to the least of his toes. Nothing happens. Only a bitter wild goose taste in the mouth. Something is wrong. “Karen!” Karen laughs, a low gunting sound, then takes hold of the man and lifts her skirts. “No, Karen! Please!” he cries, laughing. “Stop!” poof! From her skirts, Karen withdraws a wrought-iron poker, long and slender with an intricately worked handle. “It’s beautiful, Karen I” her sister exclaims and reaches for it. Karen grunts again, holds it up between them a moment, and they both smile to see it. It glistens in the sunshine, a handsome souvenir of a beautiful day.

Soon the bay is still again, the silver fish and the dragonflies are returned, and only the slightest murmur near the shore by the old waterlogged lumber betrays the recent disquiet. The boat is already far out on the lake, its stern confronting us in retreat. The family who prepared this island does not know the girls have been here, nor would it astonish them to hear of it. As a matter of fact, with that touch of the divinity common to the rich, they have probably forgotten why they built all the things on this island in the first place, or whatever possessed them seriously to concern themselves, to squander good hours, over the selection of this or that object to decorate the newly made spaces or to do the things that had usually to be done, over the selection of this or that iron poker, for example. The boat is almost out of sight, so distant in fact, it’s no longer possible to see its occupants or even to know how many there are — all just a blurred speck on the bright sheen laid on the lake by the lowering sun. The lake is calm. Here, a few shadows lengthen, a frog dies, a strange creature lies slain, a tanager sings.