The Rake Magazine

The small river town where I lived and worked for a time was in a pretty and neglected part of the state. When I first moved down there I used to tell friends that it was as if I'd relocated to a remote little corner of some obscure European country. There were rolling, wooded hills, streams and creeks, and spectacular limestone bluffs in every direction.

The town was situated in a picturesque bowl, and the main road in and out took you up and over the bluffs that surrounded the place. A mile or so outside of town to the east there was one dirt road that would take you north and down into a long valley where many of the county's Amish farmers lived tucked quietly away. That road was seldom traveled by anyone but the Amish in their black buggies, although rumor had it that teenagers had been going back in there at night for years, looking for privacy and darkness.

There was certainly darkness back there. I remember shortly after I'd come to town, a co-worker had driven me out to the valley one night and we had turned off our lights and parked at the top of the road leading down. I was startled, actually, to see all that darkness stretching away to the north. There wasn't a single light anywhere in the valley, and beyond it you could see the halo of over-light from a town maybe ten miles away over the next bluff.

At the western edge of the valley there was a good-sized marsh, a shallow, boggy, backwater thing congested with weeds and cattails. Early one fall I heard the rumor in town that some teenagers had encountered in this marsh a handful of giant geese that glowed with some internal light. They had seen these luminous geese, I was told, moving slowly through the reeds in the darkness.

This, of course, was the sort of rumor you'll hear all the time in a small town, although the majority of them aren't nearly so fanciful. The story persisted for a week or two, however, and though most of the older residents seemed to think it made a nice addition to local folklore and were content to leave it at that, I also know some folks made the trek back into the valley to investigate but turned up nothing.

Then, a month or so later, a local character by the name of Lum Hoversten bagged a six-point albino buck just outside town. Lum made the newspapers and tv stations clear up to the Twin Cities, and some Rochester banker showed up and wrote Lum a $10,000 check for the albino deer, and all of a sudden Lum was something of a celebrity around town. Lum worked for his old man, Clayton, down at the John Deere dealership, and he loved to talk. If an albino deer was worth $10,000, he said, then one of those geese back in the Amish valley ought to make him a rich man. He said it with a smile on his face, but you never could tell with Lum.

Around this same time I had gone over to a neighboring community to a livestock auction. Some of the farmers were talking about the business with Lum Hoversten and the albino deer, and the talk eventually worked its way around to the geese.

"You gotta remember, fellas, that this is Lum Hoversten talking," somebody said. "Show me a reliable man who's actually seen these geese. An albino deer is one thing, but geese that glow in the dark is quite another."

There were several Amish farmers from our area on hand, and one of the guys from our little group collared one of them on his way out and asked him about the stories. The Amish fellow actually chuckled. "When it's dark in the valley, it's dark," he said.

"So you haven't seen these geese?" someone asked.

"I haven't seen them," he said, and then he smiled, shrugged, and went on his way.

The next week I had lunch with an old gentleman who was regarded as the local scholar and historian. We were at the Copper Cup downtown, and were surrounded by farmers nodding their feed caps over the daily special.

My lunch companion was 73-years-old and had lived in the area most of his life.

"I certainly know the valley in question," he told me. "And I suppose I've been back there a few times. I do find these stories interesting on some level, but not terribly surprising. I suppose it's typical of each generation to create its own little mythologies to give this place some semblance of romance or intrigue."

I asked him in he was inclined to find the stories at all believable.

"I can't say I find them believable or unbelievable," he said. "But I haven't seen the geese, I'll say that, and I don't suppose I'm likely to. And I haven't heard from anyone who has seen them, although that may be due more to the fact that these people" --and here he indicated the locals with a sweep of his hand-- "aren't the sort to go mucking around in the dark looking for things they've already decided they don't believe in. And the fact that these geese allegedly are back there in that particular valley contributes, I'm sure, to the reluctance of most older people to look much further into the story; for as long as I can remember people have respected the privacy of the Amish in the valley. I can certainly tell you that I've never felt like I have any business back there."

He did admit that there were things about the story he found fascinating. "The first thing a rational man thinks of when he hears these stories is the ignus fatuus. Do you know it? The name means 'foolish fire,' and the phenomenon is also commonly known as the 'Will-o-the-Whisp' or, more obscurely, feu follet. At any rate, the ignus fatuus is phosphorescence, similar in appearance to a gas flame, that swirls around over marshy ground. It's apparently caused by the spontaneous combustion of gases from decaying vegetable matter."

"You think that's it?" I said.

He shrugged. "I don't know that there is an it," he said. "But I've always been fascinated by the other stories that have been offered to explain the phenomenon through the years. According to Russian folklore, for instance, these 'foolish fires' were the spirits of stillborn children. Curiously enough, somewhere else in folklore there is another similar legend associated with geese. It was once believed --and perhaps somewhere it still is-- that the noise of geese in flight issued from the souls of unbaptized children wandering the earth until Judgment Day."

I asked him what he thought someone would find if they were to make a serious effort to prove the existence of these geese.

"Oh, God, I have no idea," he said. "What does anyone ever find who goes tramping around in the darkness looking for fires or phantoms?"

I shouldn't have been there that night. I had come to town six years earlier, a kid just out of college and looking to pay his dues at a small town newspaper. Once there and settled in, though, I discovered that I liked the town, liked the people, liked the pace of life. The paper was a twice-a-week grab bag with a circulation of under a thousand. The job called for lots of coverage of community events, school board meetings, and high school sports. The pay was next to nothing, but so was the cost of living.

It certainly wasn't something I thought I'd stick with. But there I was, and one day Lum Hoversten pulled me aside downtown and mentioned all hush-hush that he was going down into the valley after the geese and thought I might like the story. The whole thing had pretty much died down in recent weeks, so I was somewhat taken aback.

"What exactly do you think you're going to do?" I asked him.

"Catch a goose," Lum said, smiling.

I laughed. "I'll tell you what," I said. "When you've got one of those geese in your possession, you bring it by the office and I'll do a great big story."

"Listen," Lum said. "I don't want this all over town, but I was down there last night and I saw them with my own eyes. Walked right out to the edge of the marsh. Ask Beryl Wyant, he was with me. Five of 'em. Looked just like a bunch of floating lanterns."

"Hell, Lum," I said.

"It would be a big mistake if you didn't come along," he said. "It'll be just you and me and Beryl. This is the kind of story that'll make us all famous."

Lum Hoversten was a big man, top-heavy, presumably hypertensive, the sort of guy who sweated when he whistled. He had a lot of energy, and even standing still he suggested a big man in motion.

"We're going down tomorrow night, provided it doesn't rain," he said. "We'll swing by your place around ten o'clock."

It was a clear night, with smoky, swirling strands of ground fog beginning to settle and move around in the valley. Lum had driven down between two fields to the edge of a small stand of trees. Just on the other side of the stand of trees was the marsh. It was no more than fifty yards down a slight rise to the edge of the water. Beryl and I were instructed to wait by the car so as not to spook the geese. From the muddy side road we'd been able to make out scattered luminous somethings trembling within the ground fog that had settled on the surface of the marsh.

Lum, clad entirely in black and wearing only stockings on his feet, crept away through the trees. I got my camera out of the backseat and monkeyed with the lens while Beryl leaned against the hood and drank a beer. We had been waiting perhaps twenty minutes when we heard a commotion down by the water, and a moment later we saw Lum lurch into view. The goose in his arms was indeed glowing, and Lum was struggling to subdue it even as he ran. He was bowed under the burden, and was hunch-hurrying through the brush, stumbling and cursing and weaving all over the place like a man who was shit-faced drunk and trying desperately to keep his pants from falling down.

It was dark, of course, and there was all sorts of brush underfoot. As he got closer we could hear Lum's wheezing, and he was still wrestling with the struggling goose, which in his arms made no sound other than the damp, papery fwoop-fwoop of its furiously treading wings. Lum veered suddenly in our direction and we could see the goose heaving in his arms and paddling desperately with its legs. Beside me I was aware of Beryl chuckling nervously and saying things like "Jesus H. Christ!" and "Goddamn, boy, goddamn!" I somehow recovered from the initial shock and managed to raise the camera to my eye and snap some photos just as the light started peeling away from the goose. It was as if sparks or fragments of bright light were spitting and swirling from Lum's arms and flowing out into his wake; almost, I later thought, like he had been attempting to transport a blazing log through the woods in the scoop of a shovel. The light was just shattering, and with each flap of its wings the goose was shaking off the light like a wet dog shaking off water.

It was a sight at once horrifying and breathtaking, the luminous particles scattering and fading in the darkness, some of them drifting for a time on the breeze and creeping through the trees. The light from the goose was fading so rapidly that after a couple of moments the creature in Lum's arms was visible only in this faint, ghostly outline.

Lum finally staggered into the clearing, completely out of breath and mumbling something I couldn't make out. The wings of the goose were now quiet, and as Lum approached the car the last embers in his arms faded away until he was moving again in complete darkness. He flopped the goose down before us and it rolled over in the grass with a sound like a water balloon. Lum fell forward against the fender of the car and leaned there for a minute, catching his breath. After a moment he craned his neck and looked back under his arm at his prize in the grass.

"Shit," he said. "It's just a goose."

"Was," Beryl said. I bent down for a closer look and Beryl nudged it with his boot. "Look dead to you?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

We all stood there for awhile, mostly trying to ignore the goose in the grass, and after a time Beryl and I silently followed Lum back through the trees to the edge of the marsh, where we found nothing but darkness. There were no signs of geese, luminous or otherwise.

I suppose it's like this: You see things sometimes in this world and after a certain amount of time passes you're no longer sure anymore what it was you saw. I know I can tell you that after a few days I could no longer say with any certainty whether or not I had entirely imagined the things that I've just recounted. Even after all these years, I still can't say. I do know that the photos I took that night were either entirely washed out, too blurry to be conclusive, or revealed nothing but a dark chaos of brush. I like to think I'm a decent photographer, but there isn't even one of those pictures that you could point to and say, "There's Lum Hoversten," let alone "There's Lum Hoversten with a goose in his arms."

To the best of my knowledge nobody ever saw the geese again, and the events of that night pretty quickly became nothing but another colorful local story.

For years, much to Lum's consternation, I refused to corroborate any of the aspects of his story or confirm my role in it. Somewhat to my surprise, I guess, and for reasons I can only guess at, Beryl Wyant also chose to keep his mouth shut, at least publicly. I've no doubt, however, that Lum's still telling the story even now.

 

Believe me, I fully recognize that a guy pretty much has to be a moron and a glutton for punishment to criticize Diablo Cody at this point. Either that or he has to be a very, very brave man, a man with the stones of Anton Chigurh.

I'll plead absolutely guilty on the first counts. As to the second, well, yes, ma'am, I do believe I'm your man there as well.

Let me get some things out of the way before I move ahead with my ill-advised temerity (and I'm willing to acknowledge that I have no idea whether temerity is always, by its very nature, ill-advised, but I'm aware of the possibility).

I know Diablo Cody is a very smart woman, and based on her work I would know this even if she hadn't let slip in interviews that she has the stratospheric IQ of the average postal service Mensan. She's a sharp, smart character, and almost all of her writing that I've seen has been very sharp, very smart, and frequently funny.

The writing in Juno is often very sharp, very smart, and very funny. The problem is that it is not the way real people talk; it's the way people talk on television sitcoms, and I guess I hold films to a slightly higher standard, at least films that get nominated for Academy Awards --films like Kramer Vs Kramer, Forrest Gump, Braveheart, and Titantic. I promise you that I wouldn't have a single complaint if Juno were nominated for an Emmy, particularly if they had a category for the snappy Post-Modern After-School Special.

I understand that the legend has it that Ms. Cody birthed the Juno screenplay in the restroom at some suburban Target, washing down fistfuls of truck stop speed with two-liter jugs of RC Cola or some such while hunched over a laptop balanced precariously on the diaper changing station. Fine, I'll buy that if you really want to make a stink about it. I also believe, however, that she had some help from a handful of down-on-their-luck former Different Strokes and Family Ties writers (Don't get me wrong: I am not saying that any of these people were in the women's room with her). And I'm also pretty damn sure that somebody from The Simpsons or The Family Guy sprinkled a little fairy dust on the thing before she turned it over to Jason Reitman.

I have other problems with the movie, yes, but I guess I also have a few problems with the mythology that I should get out of the way first. I don't, for instance, believe that Diablo Cody was ever a stripper. I just don't. I know she wrote a memoir about the "experience," but I also know that that doesn't prove a damn thing. Wouldn't you think if this story were true, we'd have been inundated with backbiting and lecherous accounts from former co-workers and the habitués of the establishments where she purportedly worked? Maybe I'm not paying proper attention --although I think I am, and I think it's hard not to-- but I haven't heard a peep.

I can't blame her for coming up with a colorful back-story. We all love colorful back-stories. They make the strangers we obsess about all the more interesting, and they're somehow even more interesting if they allow us to imagine the strangers we obsess about bare-assed naked and covered with tattoos. I'll admit it: if I had a biography or a resume I certainly wouldn't hesitate to pad the damn thing with all manner of outrageous fabrications. All the same, I don't believe a word of this particular tall tale --don't believe Cody was a stripper, don't believe she was a coal miner, and don't believe that she was the night janitor in a crematorium. I don't even believe she's from suburban Kentucky. I mean, seriously people, do you honestly believe there even is a suburban Kentucky?

There isn't, but if there were, I can pretty much guarantee you that sixteen-year-old suburban Kentucky girls wouldn't be listening to Patti Smith or the Stooges or Mott the Fucking Hoople. And I hope to God they wouldn't be listening to Kimya Dawson and the Moldy Peaches, either, because if so than the place as I imagine it just got a whole lot more hellish.

My real problems with Juno, I suppose, can be boiled down to this: If it's trying to be subversive it doesn't work. And if it's not trying to be subversive it doesn't work either.

There's too much telling and not enough showing, too much lazy shorthand about virtually every character, and by the end I don't feel like I really know or care about a single person in the entire movie (well, maybe I cared a little bit about the dad and step-mom, even if they didn't seem remotely real to me). The stammering, dorky boyfriend --played by the same stammering dork who played the same stammering dorky character in Superbad-- is, we are told, "cool." He's in a band. He also, I presume, likes the same sort of impossibly hip music Juno likes. Yet all we see him do is run around in shorts and a sweatband. The poor, improbably fertile dork does nothing but run and run. Is this supposed to be a metaphor? And, yes, one canned moment of sweetness passes between Juno and the dork, but other than that the kid doesn't much seem to understand the gravity of the situation, and we get absolutely nothing in the way of character development that would allow us to see him through Juno's eyes. She just tells us that he's the coolest guy she knows, and we pretty much have to take her word for it.

I'd also love to know what's up with Juno's best friend. Who is this girl? Does she not seem like exactly the sort of vacuous nobody that someone like Juno would openly mock? At any rate, she's ultimately nothing but what she seems, because we get exactly nothing about her to form anything but a surface impression.

And does not Juno have a little sister in this film? Am I imagining that? And if I'm not imagining it, why does Juno have a little sister? Why is this kid in the movie? Get rid of her. Let some other movie adopt her. She serves no purpose.

I'm pretty sure I could go on and on (just as I'm pretty sure that Diablo Cody --whoever she really is-- is going to have a long, fine career and that her pending horror film will be exactly the sort of riot she's most suited to write), but my ultimate problem with Juno was that in the end, in what felt like a terrible cop-out to me, the cute-as-a-button smartass turns her baby over to the one pathetic person in the entire film who is most ill-equipped to live in the world Cody's characters inhabit.

And as long as we're on the subject of the Oscars, and since I know you come here expecting regular, sharp criticism of the current state of the cinema, I may as well offer some impressions of a couple of the other nominated films I paid eight dollars to see and did not much enjoy.

I love Cormac McCarthy. I generally enjoy the Coen Brothers. And I wish like hell I hadn't seen No Country For Old Men. It's like McCarthy and the Coens teamed up to write an episode of the Andy Griffith Show for the End Times:

Deputy rushes into the room, clearly agitated: Sheriff! A truckload of Mexicans turned up just outside of town and they've been shot all to blazes! You wanna drive out to take a look?

Sheriff is sitting at a table in a diner, squinting at the newspaper and shaking his head incredulously. He hesitates, and doesn't look up from the paper: No sir, I don't believe I do.

In No Country, just as in this country, the world is going to hell in a hurry. Evil, inexplicably represented by a man with a bad haircut and a pneumatic cattle zapper, is an unstoppable force. The poor, old, beleaguered Sheriff just can't be bothered anymore to do anything but mope around and offer homespun philosophical ruminations. The crafty Vietnam vet who finds the satchel of cash comes up with all manner of crafty maneuvers to outfox his pursuers, yet never thinks to transfer all that money into a slightly less distinctive --not to mention cumbersome-- carrying case. Woody Harrelson shows up and displays remarkable skills of clairvoyance in locating both the man on the run and the money, but then --just like that-- he's dead. Then --just like that-- pretty much everybody else is dead as well, except for Evil, which still walks among us dragging his pneumatic cattle zapper, and the poor, old, beleaguered Sheriff, who right up to the bitter end offers homespun philosophical ruminations to anybody who's still alive to listen.

That's about it. The whole thing looks awfully nice, though, I'll give it that.

Ratatouille also looks awfully nice, but it also sucks. I'm sorry, but I just think it's a tall order to make the whole rats-in-the-kitchen thing palatable, particularly when we're talking about obnoxious rats, and scads of them. I had a huge problem with the lazy, jackhammer way Brad Bird and his associates named their characters --the snobby food critic is named Anton Ego! Get it? There's also a Gusteau, a Linguini, a Pompidou, a Django, and a Skinner. Could you maybe take more than five fucking minutes to name your characters before we hand you a Best Screenplay nomination? Is that really asking too much?

And, finally, there's the sheer ignorance of the main human character, Remy. Throughout the entire stinking film the guy has a rat on his head pulling his hair and putting him through all manner of contortions making the same damn dishes over and over, yet somehow, when the rat disappears, the moron doesn't know how to recreate the recipes he's made hundreds of times? What the hell?

Somebody in Hollywood --and it might as well be Diablo Cody-- better send me a check for $24, pronto. I'm for damn sure not going to drag my ass out to see Atonement until they do.

The word 'brain,' you know, never once occurs in the ancient scriptures of the world. You will not find it in the Bible --the reins, the heart, and so forth were what men felt with.

...Every man who thinks for himself and feels vividly finds he lives in a world of his own, apart, and believes one day he will come across, either in a book or in a person, the Priest who shall make it all clear to him.

--Algernon Blackwood, The Centaur

"Open your heart to the one who's dreaming of you...."

In this particular dream, which I did not have but carried nonetheless into the cold, gray morning, worrying it like an ache that was lodged at the very bottom of my throat, I was knocking, knocking, knocking, pounding on a door that no one would answer, until at last I turned away, inconsolable, and curled up in my metal saucer in the snow.

And that was when I decided it was a dream, because to accept it as an episode from reality was more than I could bear.

A dream is such a tricky thing, particularly when you reach a point where you can longer distinguish with any certainty a dream from reality. But dreams? The lingering, enduring productions of hope and imagination that have been hard-wired in who we are, often as not seeded by the various forms of enchantment we absorbed as children? Jesus, then you're getting into even more slippery territory. Big, sometimes destructive stuff, often crazy and maddeningly elusive. It's hard to pin a dream to the wall and look at it every day and say, "Right there --that's where this rubber-legged walk on the highwire is leading. That's where you'll find me somewhere down the road, happy as a fucking clam and exactly where God intended me to be."

Some people, I suppose, are fortunate enough to have their dreams play out that way, and able, somehow, to separate the clear singular from the gauzy plural very early on. They put on their blinders and just start grinding along toward the dream on the wall.

Such people --determined bastards-- kill me, really they do. From time to time you'll meet someone who can actually manage to say with some conviction, "This is what I've always wanted. This is exactly where I belong."

You can take this with a grain or salt or whatever, but I tend not to believe such people. I think they're hiding something. Most of us, I feel sure, are stuck with just this hazy constellation of images that constitutes our true dreams, many of which as we get older we spend a good deal of time hiding from. And then, occasionally, in some moment of happiness or serenity, we'll manage to catch a pure, intoxicating glimpse of something concrete and just beautiful enough to keep us lurching along through the clanging days.

This seeking

O friend

is a stupendous task,

a raging fire

it is.

Jump in

if you wish

to be baked

but if you are

merely curious

this fire

would destroy you.

--Kabir Das

 

Lord, grant me the strength and agility of those who build sentences

long and expansive as a spreading oak tree, like a great valley; may they

contain worlds, shadows of worlds, and worlds of dreams.

--Zbigniew Herbert, from "Breviary"

It was difficult to sleep, yet almost impossible to move. It was easy to be irritated about everything that was of no consequence, yet care about nothing that mattered.

--Richard Flanagan, The Unknown Terrorist

There is no love. There is only proof of love.

--Denis Diderot, or maybe Jean Cocteau

One of the firemen from the station across the alley was peeking in Katherine's windows. She could hear the crinkle of his heavy yellow coat and the tread of his big rubber boots tramping through her garden, where for years the firemen had been stealing tomatoes and zucchini in the moonlight.

This one, the peeker --Katherine had never actually seen him, yet she nonetheless had a clear image in her mind-- was a big fellow, sturdy, and modestly handsome, but old as far as firemen go. She imagined he'd fallen through a roof or two.

Katherine had been a thin, graceful dancer in her younger days, but she'd recently been gaining weight.

Things didn't always --or even often-- turn out the way that people planned. Katherine's father, who was certainly living proof of this fact, took every opportunity to remind her of it nonetheless. He wasn't a cold or mean-spirited man --quite the contrary, in fact-- and Katherine understood that he intended the words to buoy rather than discourage her. She couldn't deny, though, that she was feeling a bit discouraged, but she was also a deeply practical woman, and had a keen understanding (or so she believed) of the way the world worked.

Still, she knew that she had lost her life, or at least any life other than the one she had. Her father had always told her that it was never too late, and while this may have been literally true, she also knew that she had become a special case. She was more and more convinced that she was slowly being washed out, becoming invisible.

At some point --it now seemed like such a long time ago-- her mother had become ill. She had died very slowly, and afterwards Katherine had stayed on to look after her father and keep him company. This was the way the world in which she lived worked, and she had always accepted that there was a rightness to it. The usual horrors were easier to bear when one had the courage and decency to do the right, simple things, even if they were seldom so simple.

She still carried the life she had once imagined inside her, and it was still as beautiful as it had ever been, and likely more beautiful than it would have been if even a small part of it had been made real. Those old dreams, however, had become in time a very real retreat, and at considerable cost to Katherine's social skills and comfort level when forced to go out into the world.

She still had her piles of old movies, fashion magazines, and travel brochures, though, and there was still a magic to them that even her retreat had not been able to dispel. She could still quite vividly imagine herself aboard cruise ships and strolling through foreign cities with a smiling, handsome man at her side.

Katherine had now been alone in the big, old house since her father died. The calendar on the kitchen wall still showed the month of his death. It had been almost five years, and she still missed his gentle voice, kindness, and old fashioned manners. In the year before his death he had been bedridden, and Katherine would read to him from the newspaper and from his old favorite books. He loved Sherlock Holmes and Trollope. When she would appear each afternoon with his tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich he would kiss her on the cheek and say, "Don't you just carry a candle to my heart?"

Her father worried about her. Once upon a time he had built her a large, ornate dollhouse --she was a girl who had from a very early age rejected dolls, dismissing them as "dead children"-- and had presented it to her for her birthday one year.

The dollhouse was a beautiful thing. There were tiny chairs and tables and four-poster beds; above the dining room table there was a miniature chandelier, and the living room featured a fireplace and candlesticks on the mantle, a detailed oriental rug, and a coffee table on which were stacked tiny books and magazines. There was even a coat rack inside the front door.

"Who lives here?" Katherine had asked her father.

"That is for you to decide," her father said. "In the meantime, you will live there in your imagination, and every night there will be music and lively conversation and all manner of happiness."

One side of the dollhouse was wide open, and when she was a little girl Katherine would crouch beside it in her bedroom and stare into its still, dark, quiet rooms. It was lovely to her, but there was something about it that also made her sad.

Then one summer she started capturing grasshoppers in the weedy lot of the old abandoned Mormon church at the end of her block, and she would carry the grasshoppers home and place them gently in her dollhouse. She went to the public library and read about grasshoppers in the encyclopedia, and scattered green grass and carrot shavings and green peas and corn throughout the rooms of the dollhouse. She lined one of the four-poster beds with grass, and was delighted to discover a grasshopper drowsing contentedly in the middle of a bed one evening.

Katherine brought home more and more grasshoppers, and they would always disappear after a time, but there were nights where her dollhouse would be trilling into the early morning with their lovely music, just as her father had once predicted.

As she got older, and particularly after her mother's death, Katherine's father would often tell her that she needed to get out and meet people. She would answer that she'd never met anyone in her entire life, a petulant statement that nonetheless had some truth to it.

She was shy, and had always believed that she would find her future, and whatever friends she might one day make, somewhere else out in the world. She had never liked to go to church with her parents because there was never anyone there that she knew.

She did take dance lessons for a year or two, studying with an old woman who lived in town and had allegedly once danced on Broadway. Katherine had displayed a natural aptitude for dance, and she had enjoyed the experience and the freedom she felt when she was moving. Eventually, however, she danced exclusively in the privacy of her bedroom, dancing to songs on her phonograph and practicing to to be the person she never became.

One night, after the fireman --whose presence she had still only sensed, but never seen-- had been peeking in her windows for several weeks, Katherine realized that she was just lost enough to be stirred by the attention. She was simultaneously tickled and disturbed by how stirred she felt. She felt for the first time in a very long while like a candle had been carried to her heart. The idea that she was being watched, that someone was seeing her, recalled to her the private magic of those long-ago nights when the music of the grasshoppers had filled her room and she had fallen asleep with her head full of beautiful dreams.

Katherine showered, brushed her hair, and went to the hall closet and found her mother's prettiest dress. She dug out and lit some ancient Christmas candles. And then she put one of her father's old Strauss records on her phonograph player and she danced.

We asked the captain what course

of action he proposed to take toward

a beast so large, terrifying, and

unpredictable. He hesitated to

answer, then said judiciously:

"I think I shall praise it."

--Robert Hass, from Praise

Every once in awhile he would experience a disorienting moment --these instances were almost like seizures-- in which he would find himself wondering just what the hell he thought he was doing. He couldn't spend much time with that question or he'd be paralyzed. He knew this.

He'd allowed himself to get pinned down a few times, and things would start swirling in his skull and he'd feel like he'd been turned inside out and salted. It was an ugly business.

He recognized that at this point he didn't have any good answers. It had already gone too far to be justified or explained. Once, though, he had not been this man, and wouldn't even have been able to imagine the man he had apparently become, or any man like him.

He didn't know quite what he was doing, but he had a vague notion for why he was doing it. If anyone were to ask him, if he were caught (and this seemed increasingly inevitable), he would be able to offer up only the shortest and most pathetic of explanations: he was lonely. If pushed he was prepared to elaborate. He had lost everything, everything he'd ever had that he wanted, along with every hope and dream and brief, confused vision of what his life might one day be.

Yet he was alive, which was remarkable in and of itself. He'd spent years --most of the last two decades-- trying to imagine and will himself dead. He'd made plans, done research, presumably gone as far as a man could go without actually succeeding in killing himself. At a certain point it had occurred to him that he might well be one of the world's foremost experts on suicide. He had read dozens of books on the subject, and literally thousands of articles in newspapers, magazines, and journals. He had scrapbooks in which he'd compiled almost two thousand different examples of successful suicides. By his last count, these people had utilized upwards of two hundred different methods in taking their own lives.

He had started to think of this business, which had taken up the latter half of his forties and much of his fifties, as perhaps the one great undertaking of his life.

Then, a week before his fifty-sixth birthday, he started stealing dogs.