A Spy in the Ruins. Christopher Bernard

Oil on the surface of the water. Tangled hair and cigarette butts in the sewer drain. A newspaper shouts that a politician has lied to it. A bus exhausted to a standstill vomits an irritable clot of neighbors. Viscera of unease. Tighten. Smirks at the back of good morning. A battlefield littered with undegrading mines. To say nothing of the tedium of waiting for the next eradicating discharge.

      Ring the bell. Memory over winter fields. The crack of a shotgun came to you from a fissure in your sleep followed by the echo. In dream memory loomed. The castigations of the luminous. Buried in the forbidden territory of the real it blazes.

      The solitary one withdrew into silence there was nowhere now to hide. Building a honeycomb of stillness around him he kept the others at bay behind a wall of stiff smiling. They treated him like a child he would behave like a child. Yet he was a child. I ask no forgiveness I give no quarter. Proud and ashamed of your conceit in your mind yours was a heroism of solitude. I hugged it to me like an honor or a scar. The rings of silence opened around him pulling in the winter birds to nest in the branches. A falling star burned through a leaf and ignited a forest into acres of fire. And I stood within it singing at the top of my lungs. The wet streets smeared with scattered trash.

      For the air was jammed with signal. The heliotrope in the ghetto lot sagged in tangles of glare and amazement. Plethora. Bricks stuck to mortar and aimless encounters. A fist closing around a tube of wax. Sculls skittering down the river like huge waterskates. A centipede in the bath tub. Migrating colonies of roaches. Scrambling rats. The walls sweated vermin and sardonic ripostes. A family in that place was a form of organized insecurity.

      No doubt.

      In immanence a patient god lies in the paper under your feet. Speaking without sound in the slang of the city’s misery. Without pause.

      Well the sortie was made. The platter shield up the basin-helm cocked over the brow. A cat’s cradle of stares linked across the subway stations. The casual swipe of the train. Entire generations never made it upstairs.

      A fit of paranoia on a regular basis was only natural.

      Given that the family itself was on the verge of collapse. In the swarm of darknesses vying with futility. The gymnastics of desperation as though one were not even allowed to die so told the cry rising from the street. We are not allowed so you are not allowed.

      Commands from all sides countermanding commands from all sides. Of hope for example in general and in some cases particular. Which was as in other such cases of dubious account.

      Lament become customary. The muzak of the neighborhoods.

      You will eventually not even notice it or notice it only when it isn’t there the eerie silence of the countryside those rare times you are able to visit it dependent as you are on others’ transportation. Outside the raucous rural night that is. Where is the music of despair I hear nothing the silence is like a love song in a death camp have you ever heard a love song in a death camp haven’t they been told why are they not grieving why the macabre merriment of the birds secretive spectacle of the woods harrowing fertility of the cornfields chastened megalomania of the hill-ranges whispering death has made its peace with life and they lie together now under the crippled carrousel. How can this be embracing the trash of them. Come kiss me now so I will forget. Wrap me up. Cradle me. In the arms of. Of a morning I have forgotten.

      And panic gives you the slap no you must not let yourself be taken in every belief however small touched like a pin and boom in consequence the sweet rose path down the fragrant garden to the woodpile where you were beaten into submission stripped to bare buttocks and strapped stripped to shame weeping with laughter.

      From love not from love no love never love. A certain boy had a peculiar talent for stimulating unaffection even as a child he could see it in the startled look on their faces. Cagey askant. Wincing suspicious. Disconcerted. Discomfited. Disgusted. Any more? At what he asked himself. The face that met his gaze in the mirror repelled him wasn’t that enough. The haughty brows the prim shapeless mouth tilted fleshy nose blond mop. Ice blue the little pupils opaque and vague crooked eyes. Greasy paste of hair. Black heads white heads inflaming the surbase of the nostrils lower cheeks and chin. An odor of disdain emanating from him followed him he could sense it obscurely. Self-hatred absorption obsession contempt. Naked and writhing within a camouflage of sarcasm and pride. Crying out yet loathing every offered hand. Stupid and willful and preening and desperate. Gardening his despairs (thought it was despair he did not yet know the meaning of despair) like a promise.

      Every she who came to visit his days had no time for the immolating ego to say nothing of the groin.

      The no-self that looked so much like an all-self.

      The all-self a no-self ah wisdom had he known.

      As he tried to suck the world into his pit.

      The beatings. Not entirely random yet not always foreseeable. The back of the brush against the naked buttocks. The slap against the face. The gagging of the mouth with soap. The bending of the waist across the knee. The only remembered meeting of skin to skin surely not the only but the only remembered ones. The slap against the side of the head. Spankings. So called as to be a regular event. Weekly. Sometimes daily during particularly demonic seasons. And deserved. They were not unearned or unjust. They cut the limit to his and his siblings’ spasms of anarchy. They formed a wall against which one could lean. The sureness of punishment almost a consolation. The ways of rage fortified thus against the evil that raised them. Would raise them. Might. Could. If only will.

      From the labyrinth of woods to the rat’s maze of the. Reduced to five at that time they had come. The beautiful hysterical mother who was not his mother yet who if not her was that mysterious absence who inspired shy pity for him for the stark irreplaceable loss the sardonic insecure sister half sister the brother half brother of the perpetual smile. Yourself withdrawn nebulously defensive. And the father of ice and style punctuated with slaps. An equatorial tension reigned flanked with Mr. Frostees. Berthed in rows of rotting wharves. An alarming but vivifying stench. The house was buttressed with light shafts the apartment barred with shadow and brick. The lawn stretched clear on all sides the streets were jammed with vacancy. The only noises there were distant shouts and dog barks the asthma of a tractor weaving about a field the only silences here were between the siren’s howling and traffic’s backlash angry shouts.

      Silence at the head of the table broken by irascible lectures. Elegance and a cold tolerance veiling vast despising. Sumptuous food. Riotous candor on one side of the dining room table meeting timid duplicitous silence on the other. The mother-yet-not-mother’s nerves the father’s nightly yelling at her for once again forgetting the salt. The hectoring self-pity across the table. Sitting next to the skinny grin. Your childish smirk little arch comments. An occasional relapse into giggling. The occasional irruption of unheralded fury. But usually the volcano remained silent just smoking. An atmosphere of anxious social superiority assumed by the father still to be proven for the mother who was yet not mother. We were part of the decor of reassurance. The need to dominate one’s neighbors as the only way to tolerate having any. The same to dominate the world the only way to support the inanity of family life a subadult world that kept the parents nailed to the infantilism of the kids. The false sense of power pretense of authority the childlike grandiosity of parenthood. To say nothing of the marriage cage though at that time such cages were beginning to split with increasing ease. You did not know this at the time do not know this now only guess as you pick at straws of understanding to figure what got you scribbling associations onto a tablet in an otherwise empty room between bouts of staring into space like. A bump on a log. As they used so often to characterize you from their perches at each end of the table. Often justly such was your talent for laziness daydreaming later on passiveness futility self-demoralization if that is a word it shall be a word. Over your peas.

      An elegance cold and angry. Translated without a hitch from country to city. Fibrillating with nerves the feminine half.

      A repletion of scorn arrogance and disdain made for a sustaining spiritual nourishment.

      Almost hidden behind the mother’s nervous loving unhappiness fringed with frustration and spite. That