Pricksongs & Descants Read Free Page B

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 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.
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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; 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.
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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 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