Over the last twelve months Magic: The Gathering, a fantasy-based, collectible card game, coursed through my veins like crack. In Magic you act out the duel between rival wizards and cast the cards in your hand as spells in order to vanquish your opponent. The game features five colors of magic: blue, green, and red correspond to water/air, earth/nature, and fire/chaos, while black and white play into the traditional good and evil color schemes. The different spells in Magic serve various functions: summonings conjure creatures, such as helpful Birds of Paradise or the malevolent Goblin King, with which you both attack your foe and protect yourself from her monsters; attack spells like Lightning Bolt or Drain Life damage your enemy directly and ignore any defenders she may summon; defensive magics cure damage to yourself or to your minions, as with Healing Salve, or, like Circle of Protection: Red, prevent cards and creatures of a certain color from affecting you; sorceries, the most powerful spells in Magic, remain more individual in nature—Time Walk allows you to take an extra turn after the end of your current one, while Wrath of God destroys all creatures in play. The final twist to Magic lies in the ante. After shuffling, but before play begins, each player cuts the other’s deck, and flips over the top card, which becomes the ante. The winner keeps her ante, as well as that of her opponent. In multiplayer games, each player antes one card, winner take all.

Magic punched all of my buttons: the game’s emphasis on the fantastic, the fact that certain cards, such as Time Walk, are rarer or more useful in play, and the intricate strategies involved in constructing a deck that viably balances the colors conspired to hook me more deeply than any interest of mine since 1977, the year that I discovered both Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons. I played Magic with friends between classes, at all-night restaurants, and sometimes as often as four days a week, for three to six hours at a time. Though my interest in D&D and Star Wars has waned, I occasionally fall prey to something like Magic, something that lures me with a siren’s call and transforms me, Jekyll-like, from a mostly-docile twenty-five year old into the madman who, eye gleaming, seeks eagerly for the elusive, needed fix that obsession whispers in my mind.

Magic crowns a long line of pursuits that have sufficiently aroused my curiosity to rivet my attention, if only for awhile. I delved these interests to their cores, and always to the point of exhaustion; when I grew bored I discarded one pursuit for another as time cooled my fever. You can trace the history of my obsessions through the fallout of stuff I have accumulated: rolls of Mercury dimes, cast in silver from 1916 to 1934, that now appreciate gracefully in an uncle’s safe; hundreds of painted figurines—dwarves and goblins, archers and magi that once marched across maps of Europe and laid siege to the Holy Roman Empire—lie in slotted boxes, protected by foam; foils wired with electric cords for fencing competition lean against a bookcase, and grow slow rust; a handmade, black velvet pouch with golden tassels drawn shut contains the many-sided dice of role-playing games that saved or doomed worlds with their results, the spare fuse to a string of Christmas lights, a Penn State bus token, and the only Star Wars action figure to survive, intact, seventeen additional years of miscellaneous pursuits.

The key to understanding the level of personal investment that I made for several months in Magic, or for several years in the case of other diversions, lies in exploration. Magic offers the unknown, the untried, through pitting your finely-honed deck of black knights, plague rats, and fallen angels against . . . what? You don’t know, and that’s the point. Your opponent probably owns cards you’ve never heard of, much less seen before, and probably employs combinations of cards you never considered putting together (Giant Growth on the Frozen Shade, tap the Dwarf to make it unblockable, Berserk it, and I’m dead?!?—What!??). With more than 350 cards in the basic set, divided among the five colors, you may prefer the blue and black styles of play, say, over white or green; you may also find multiples of certain cards exceptionally useful (imagine the look of glee in your eyes as you pound your opponent with two Time Walks, take two extra turns in a row—and make her rue the day she even thought of putting a Berserk into her deck). Expansion sets, released every three to five months, offer completely new cards that allow for the continual, almost infinite, escalation of deck concepts, card combinations, and strategies. Similarly, as new cards are introduced, others go out of print to maintain the freshness of the game; out-of-print cards often increase in value far beyond the 11.7 cents you pay for each in a booster pack—the Black Lotus, a now unavailable, carries a $200 price tag, and continues to appreciate on the internet. You can well imagine how my checkbook suffered . . . .

The prospect of profiteering by reselling cards, though, did not draw me to Magic. Magic offered a return to the uncharted, to the inherent curiosity in potential: how will my deck fare? what cards does she have? what will I ante (gods, I hope it’s not my Time Walk). Magic opened a window through which I could climb, if only temporarily, across the uncertain edge of the present, into basements and backyard games of Jailbreak, into the hidden paths of memory I’d misplaced years before.

Brushing the powder from my fingers and into my pants, I lift myself from the floor of the coal bin, and stalk the basement further, looking behind the furnace, into the strangely wrought alcoves that, somewhere, must hide his secret door. Though the bricks act just like bricks no matter how many I push or prod, my only success is in covering the coal dust with chips of white paint. This new house hides more than it reveals, and though Dad’s shown me the blueprints, which mark a secret room on the third floor and no others, I continue to search. He’s got to be here, somewhere.

The red latticework ahead casts cross-hatched shadows on the boxes behind, and, again, I stop to listen for whatever may be on the other side, waiting to pounce when I pass through the arch. I hear the footsteps of my grandfather tread the first floor, as he moves slowly through the hall toward the den; I hear water as it falls against panes in the window wells, the spatter of drops like muted footsteps padding across a rug: I hear—a shift, the sudden crack of plastic on wood, and my once-brother-now-enemy Phil leaps from behind the door of the tool room, wielding giant Tinkertoy doom. He swings his lightsabre, but I duck and yell, "You can’t get me, Vader." We eye each other across our blades. I wonder which of us will be the first to run.

* * *

"I can hide all night long," I yell from within the bushes behind the ivy, then lope along the fence to the outdoor fireplace, drop into a crouch, and scan the backyard. Mike Barber and John are in jail by the compost heap, trying to look at me so Anthony won’t see me. I don’t know where the rest of the guards are. The bulb on the Dillons’ back porch casts just enough light to let me see Anthony move off toward the other fence. I glide to the treefort, then pass the swingset to hide behind what used to be grapevines, and try to catch my breath. The earth and loam of compost fills my lungs. Someone’s in the Edelmans’ yard, so their German Shepherds must be inside, but I can’t see who it is. Half the team’s in jail, and we need a plan—Anthony suddenly shifts back toward me as someone leaps the fence from behind, knocking us both into the dirt, and huffs, "One two three no breaksies." Caught, by Mike O’Connor. Anthony and Mike escort me to the jail in time for Scott’s triumphant "Jailbreak," reaching through the Edelmans’ fence. My legs won’t stretch for the front yard, leap the rosebed, or barrel around the side of the house, so I just sit. They capture me again, just so I don’t try to pull another, "You never captured me—I was free and in jail the whole time." They learned from the last time. I wait.

* * *

Her fingers hover, and twitch from knight to pawn. She can take my rook with her white knight, or threaten my queen with the pawn—rid herself of a not-so-threatening pest, or push a pawn one step closer to queendom. The board, eight squares by eight, lays strewn with black pieces that have ground her forces into the upper-right corner, then, inexorably, removed them one by one. She glances at me, dressed in Bishop Eustace blazer, white shirt, thin black tie, and almost chides the discover-check once move behind the loss of my rook. She taps her fingers on the table, and looks to the left and the right to see how other matches stand: her school, Saint Paul VI, remains ahead at the varsity level, three matches to one. She smiles. The orchestra of clocks tick toward apocalypse. I wear a blank mask in an effort to force her hand toward either piece and thus secure our second victory. Her eyes squint in the shift to decision—pawn to Queen’s Knight Four, a threat to my queen backed by a second pawn. She taps the button on her clock and begins the annotation. Her pencil scars the form with the rasp of parchment that crumbles at a touch. I slide my bishop to King’s Bishop Six, rap the clock, and say, "I don’t think you’ve a way out of this one," though I know she doesn’t. My "Checkmate" cuts across the board, knife-like and vulgar—an end to our match, though far from sufficient to win the tournament.

* * *

I turn the volume on the stereo to three o’clock. The audible hiss of the tape glares a moment before the bass rumbles to life, then stops, and begins again. Yes sounds out the weekend with "Make the white queen run so fast/she hasn’t got time to make you wise." Quiet hours won’t begin until midnight, but the volume begins to push the limits of my Fisher one-piece system—tape deck, receiver, and turntable all rolled into one—so I turn it down to one-thirty sharp, settle into my pillows against the desk, and sift the debris of my thoughts from the goosebumps that the first part of "I’ve Seen All Good People" often raises across my neck and arms. The open window weaves a breeze through the notes that cool the early September humidity. I grab the clipboard, draw my knees up to support it, and hold the mechanical pencil in my mouth like some piratical dagger. The light from the window grows dim, and I plug in the string of Christmas lights that wind up and around the angles of the walls and creep across the ceiling, trying to form new constellations.

The desk, the music, and the world drop to background. The words begin. Each expects, and demands, my attention. Fragments and phrases, the occasional idea for a title, they devour meter and form with equal disregard. The murmur of the poem grows louder as evening spawns a moon and stars, then drowns the stereo under a cacophony of screams, sainted and unholy sounds bound to earth and enslaved, writhing under the fetters of rote and rhyme. Cimmerean, chiaroscuro, lepton: the poem bears each from across the Styx, inked though unwilling. Time slides and twists while the words fly all around and trace the arc of hurricanes. Like tides, words rise and surround me with remnants borrowed from the present and the past, slash from the air a tapestry, and then ebb. I grow slowly aware.

When I left New Jersey for Penn State, and then Penn State for Kansas, I brought with me a geometry of eights—two tables and one rose-tinted mirror, each antique, each octagonal. The small table is rather plain, while the larger one is carved on all four sides with faces that leer in an almost demonic fashion when seen under the right light; it’s more ornate than the smaller table or the mirror. The mirror’s rose tint shades the image and thus removes its reflections one step further from the real world. Octagons and eights hold special significance for me—I was born on an eighth, though my interest in octagons, and these three in particular, goes beyond mere numbers. The tables and mirror have traveled with me from the east coast, and are among my strongest ties to the people and places there that define what I call home. Through them, I maintain some nebulous, but reassuring, contact with my family and the circle of friends from Penn State. Perhaps as importantly, however, through my personal geometry of eights and octagons, I attempt to distill the perfections that time has leeched into mere memory, and to conjure the pasts that drive words through my fingers and into paper.

The significance that these memories and pasts hold, though, has dwindled slowly, like my interests in D&D, Star Wars, and Magic. Objects and memories alike collect dust—and though I occasionally brush the dust from the stuff, whether from tables with rags and Pledge, or old friends with weekend phone calls, to evoke and savor memories, I do so with less and less frequency. I’ve even begun selling some pieces of my past—old gaming material I don’t use anymore, Star Wars and Magic cards now out of print and in high demand on the internet. The call of the past no longer rings clarion, the words flow sluggishly when they flow at all, and nothing has stepped forward to halt this process of distancing and erosion.