Passion Play by Jerzy Kosinski

he would look down at cars streaking in whatever freedom the highwayallowed, each blur a rider buckled in his plastic-covered saddle, in command of his solitary mount, his energy and surge a fusion of oil and flame, his tack and harness a cocoon of glass and steel. On impulse, Fabian might raise an arm in greeting; as metal, rubber and flesh hurtled below him, he was aware of heads turned for an instant from the asphalt belt to a man on a horse, the bizarre sentry standing guard on the overpass. Eager again for the woods, lost to everything but his senses, Fabian would turn the horse on its haunches and trot back into the thicket, cutting through huge stalks of hornbeam, sumac and boxwood.
    Toward dusk, he would ride easily back to his VanHome, relishing the promise of the meal he would soon prepare. From the refrigerator in his galley he would take a thick slab of beef, glistening and marbled, its bone doubling its weight, a ribbon of fat hemming the piece like lace. Studding it with spikes of garlic, dusting it with pepper and salt and herbs, he would place it between layers of onion and leave it to marinate, the meat now a pungent sandwich of bathing scent, before he sallied forth to ready his forest banquet.
    Taking a canvas bag or a sack, he would gather scraps and strips of bark, the season’s maple and birch, chestnut, oak, sheaves of the narrow-leaved branches of spruce and fir and pine, then a variety of cones, the springy pliant ones, young and full, as well as the desiccated, withered husks. The sack swelled with great clumps of weeds and damp grass mingling with batches of common fern, ribbons of liverwort, some moss, a heap of quillworts, whatever plants and herbs he chanced upon in trampling the brush.
    Windless evenings were best for the rites of forest, food and solitude, and he would make a shelter for himself secured by the barrier of his VanHome, cloistered from the gusting invasion of the breeze. Scooping out a shallow hollow of earth for his fireplace, he would bolster it with shoals of stone, then bridge the stones with an old iron triple bar from a stable. He would first set a match to a layer of coarse bark, then feed the fire with dried-out clusters of pine cones and perhaps a branch or two of spruce or larch, but when the flames spread to swamp the wood, he tamped them down with splashes of water he brought from hisgalley, until the hollow was only a dull amber glow. He heaped the embers then with the verdant plunder he had gathered in the forest, shuffling the heap until smoke appeared.
    He would put the meat on the bars, suspended high enough above the smoking fire to escape searing by a stray raw flame erupting through the layers of leaves and moss, fern and pine. The smoke clotted, its tang more acrid, the meat starting to sweat, then recoiling and shriveling, the fat a trickling dribble prodding the fire to yet another volley of blue and orange flame. When Fabian turned it over the first time, the steak had already changed color; soon it was time for more salt and pepper, the herbs anointing its gleaming surface, then more heat, a fresh slew of the greenery that would mute the flames, and again the cycle of rotation.
    The process was long; twilight dissolved into night. Fabian would settle down to his meal, the banked embers flickering out, the smoke a trailing funnel above him, his hands and clothes and the forest enclave liquid with the aroma of cooked flesh, the steak as docile and comforting in his mouth, without taint of char or scorch, as it had been in the mouth of the boy, a farmhand long ago, when he had had to smoke chunks of horseflesh for the farmer’s family, making certain that the cherished meat, hoarded for months, would be spared the open flame, the essence of its life preserved, its tender substance sheltered by the gentle smoke long after the heat was gone from it.
    The country’s major polo resorts at which Fabian could have played, whether those in the Midwest, where polo