Pricksongs & Descants (3 page)

○ ○ ○

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.

○ ○ ○

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
bath
r
oom
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.

○ ○ ○

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.
”

○ ○ ○

She peeks into the bathroom; ye
s, he is in there, crouching ob
scurely, 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.

○ ○ ○

“
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 heap
e
d-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! Se
e
? 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 bath
r
oom 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 ex
ce
pted 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 o
f the fractured glass still sur
rounding 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!
”

○ ○ ○

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.

○ ○ ○

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.

○ ○ ○

“
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.

○ ○ ○

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.

○ ○ ○

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-smell
ing, 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.

○ ○ ○

“
Call it woman
’
s intuition,
”
she
says with a light laugh. He ap
praises 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!
”

○ ○ ○

A small green snake lies motionless across
the path. The girl ap
proaching 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.

○ ○ ○

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.

○ ○ ○

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.