Maybe the scribe is showing his age, but this is pretty sexy (if not downright naughty) stuff rendered in adventurous, experimental prose rendered by the 20-something scribe that, while annoying or overdone in some places, works nicely in this vignette. Looking back, it's a little shocking who the highway scribe felt it was okay to pass this manuscript onto, and little shocking to remember how shocked he was that right and good-thinking friends were shocked. Shocking!
INVESTIGATION INTO SATURN’S PAST UNCOVERS A PEARL OF TRUTH
“As did Dalí,” says Saturn, “I believe that money is the only reason for doing anything.”
Reclining again in bed before the fan we are an entangled three of twitching skins and flinching reflexes in a winddown of talk and restful poses. Rich, though there’s no real money to speak of. Elendele is reading up on Antonio Gramsci and the Turin Factory Councils. Saturn is spoonfeeding me Malarmé.
Elendele mocks her step-sister then, and sticks her middle finger up inside herself. Checks her pocket for some money for her step-sister.
“Nothing in here,” she teases.
“But the nectar of Narcissus,” I vex her and get that wet finger flashed in return.
Fired by the silly rhetoric of afterblow Saturn sparks back, “I’m here to save you,” she points me with her tongue, “and any others like you my step-sister has managed to manacle,” and then she sticks her finger up inside Elendele, who masks her face with pepper ecstasies and tries to lock Saturn in. But she can’t.
Saturn slips her. Gives her the taunt, then the smile. “Not eighteen anymore,” and they both break out in a laughing rash.
Saturn composes herself, says she just doesn’t see it. “You! You could have it all. Those eyes, that skin, that hair cascading you like waves over momentary sandcastles.
“You must want to screw up your life more than her,” she jabs Elendele knowingly, and me more innocently. Saturn, a woman of analytical tendencies, can see that I am a nobody, and a dandy one at that.
“All those assets and you throw yourself to her lions. Journalists. Hah! The officeholders of the low paid poetic world, blessed by low rank in officialdom and a paycheck that’s nothing more than the difference between themselves and the street.
Sweet and thin senator. When she’s done with you and the hair is gone, all anybody will remember of you is your big nose.”
“Okay.”
“Wait until she’s finished you, shared your bone oh creative one. Let her inspire, but nurture never. Fetal yourself close to her through the sunlit particles of unwound afternoons. Fall into her debt. Then watch Elendele spread her butter stuffs.”
“Saturnina I can’t tell when you’re reading Malarmé and when you’re being you.”
But this came too late. Now, her finger in the air, standing on the bed, half revealed in sheets like some pink statuess, some oracle sworn of an acropolis, “The clay people! The steady dreamers! Fountains of whatever! Crushed again by conglomeration and commerce! Road-railed by the wily entrepreneur that I am. And I am the wily entrepreneur…” and she collapses exhausted into the pillows.
Such speechifying must have run in the family and, out of rhetorical courtesy, Elendele dismissed her as a lackey of the merchant class and then colors in the confusion for me.
“Saturn has come to stay with us because of the devastation she feels over the recent death of her cat, Marcel.”
Saturn smiles her good witch’s smile, they turn to their books, and the matinee performance draws to a close. Gracious in its brevity, in its serious caprice.
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