Saga of the Kites, The

Excitement! We in Psych Ward were frantically constructing kites for the annual Kite Festival on Observatory Hill. Our rivals in Bum Ward, Reconstructive Surgery, and Chronic Fatigue were working round the dock. My design which had come to me in a dream vision was a Purple Condor of the exact size and proportions of a California condor. As it turned out, my only serious competitor was an individual in Bum Ward whose Giant Reticulated Python rose to a height of nearly i,ooo feet before gale-force winds from the Great Lakes shattered it into bits of tissue paper and plyboard. In the final minutes of the competition my Purple Condor, the crowd's favorite, expected to win first prize, suddenly nose-dived to earth.

Next spring, our spirits undaunted, my rival and I constructed even more ambitious kites. Mine was a Bearded Silver Muskelunge of surpassing beauty and poignancy with mica-chip eyes and a hint of rakish scintillant teeth. My rival in Burn Ward revealed an astonishing, some thought rather showy Eiffel Tower Incandescaite. Again, both our kites rose quickly above the scores of other, lesser kites, initially favored by the capricious winds of the Great Lakes, but finally, at a height of nearly 1,100 feet, savagely torn and shredded to bits scattered over an area of hundreds of square miles.

I will say nothing of the bitterness of these losses but move swiftly to my third kite, revealed the following spring-Samuel Johnson's Death Mask in eggshell and sepia tones. The crowd erupted in spontaneous applause at the unexpected sight of the great man's glaring piggish eyes, lantern jaws, and tight-curled powdered wig rendered in the most fragile tissue paper, borne triumphantly aloft by the wind. (There was no serious challenger this year. My rival in Burn Ward had reportedly died.) Another time, my kite rose swiftly above the pack, maintained its lead for nearly forty minutes, then suddenly, as if a god's invisible hand had reached up to snatch it down, Samuel Johnson's Death Mask nose-dived into the Cuyahoga River.

Give up, my therapist Dr. Ripton has advised. Should I?

JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author most recently of the novel I'll Take You There (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2002) and the novella Beasts (Otto Penzler/Carroll & Graf, 2002). She teaches at Princeton University.

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