Business was quiet but I neither wrote nor kept my promise to a magical order. Instead my time was occupied by repetitive games, the outcome of which no longer held any surprise for me. I dismissed my opponents as little better than automata. These were the poet Simon Parsons and an unknown girl: in print frock and heavy boots, she kept on her woollen hat through the heat. It occurred to me later that perhaps I had been the dummy, finding the same moves, out of boredom and absence of mind, in response to a strategy of gentle variation which could never tire the others.

Into the room where we played came one whose name shifted each time it was uttered: Abaivonin, Abaivovin, Abaivovim. His head was such as might rise from a meditation upon clouds, bruises and stains: a sheath of black scales imposed form upon a liquid body.

Once I set my foot
upon the fault beneath
which the demon
stirred, and fled even
from that, to seldom
venture further
than the turf maze or
the house where the
hermaphrodite dwelt.

Ahead of me there
walked a man become
wild: the dung he let
fall to the ground
cracked open to reveal
glittering insects.

Now the intruder laughed at me as some mere phantom who had become coarse in order to overcome a natural bookishness and timidity; who seduced but would not possess, from a terror of being possessed in return; who maintained a flimsy show of independence despite being strapped for cash and harried. I asked if it was through his curse that whatever power lay in me had come to be dissipated upon hybrid unsatisfactory projects, but he brushed the question aside, and devoured Simon, whose texts form the past of my drift, beneath mantled wings.

There seemed nothing for the girl and I to do but resume our game, so we cleared the third set of little pyramids from the board between us. I admired her dirty blunt fingers. She spoke of how she had crouched down outside the Friends' Meeting House to eat nettles spattered with bird shit. Then our conversation took a strange turn.