A Spy in the Ruins. Christopher Bernard

      He sought a place to pray in but there was nowhere there. The churches mocked the divine the surrounding city cursed it. He walked until he was exhausted in his search for a mark of the holy. There was only the humanly obscene. Nowhere reflected back the delicacy of a face.

      The breath of a god murmured in the trees and passed over his head beyond him. The sky was out of reach of his hands. He stretched his mind until he thought it would snap. He sought the place where there was no one. Beyond the air. He remembered bitterly the silence of the woods the darkness of evening by the sea. In these eyes there was no paradise.

      He shouted voicelessly through the streets. They responded with equal eloquence. Innamorata divina. He wept without tears or so he thought. But there was nowhere.

      And still he sought. Like the child he still was. In the silence of music. The whiteness of books. The darkness of the stroke of a pen on paper. There. Sharpened to a form just beyond his sight. There brightened and fluttered a vanishing hosanna.

      Oh to be thankful for the writhing labyrinth of life how could he be he who had been at one time so joyfully grateful for the gift life’s gift in this. In this.

      He shook the locked casket of his past listening to the bones rattle. Inside must be the key to the secret of his loss of. He shook. Only as a last resort would he take a hammer to it. And out of it emerged a cloud of moths dusting his face with their wings.

      To crawl one goes on bended knees. Lowers the forehead to the ground. Raises the voice in. Lamenting the loss of. What.

      One must live one’s punishment in the burnt-out garden. At the edge of the garden are the walls at regular intervals the towers where the guards keep watch along the top of the walls is a sparkling of splintered glass and a snow of peach-colored petals. The further they advanced toward the walls the farther the walls moved. And the heavier was the scent of lilacs roses and honeysuckle it made the air drunk slowly drove them crazy. They had thought they were inside the prison. When they finally escaped the trap tripped with the sound of a shot.

      A crystal garden of cement and glass. It rose all around him uncanny stalagmites. Clawing its way toward an unreachable sky. Into which the oak does not grow. One expected it for oneself however infinite and unending growth. The feeling of youth was the feeling of surge. Every wall was a test. Smoothly laughing. There shall never be no more worlds. To conquer. Even in the brick encampment of the city. In such weakness was such power. Such sense of power. Such mad and drunken glory. There was a heaven to be found in that particular insanity. So be it. For nothing else had one broken the shell. In this seed dwelled this sun. The air was dense with light. You were a bottomless lake at the heart of the mirror. And the sun as it rose cried love. And the sun as it set cried love. And the haze of stars drew the moon through the night like the sparrows the chariot of love. He could not believe it was not so. Frail brave little boat he blindly rowed. All happy. Singing softly to himself so that no one might suspect. No one know. No one envy. And no one knew no one envied no one suspected no one saw the sudden fall toward the sun beneath him.

      Winter grew and the birds escaped from her hair to the abandoned forests. All hollow in the place’s heart. Pinging gently like a bell made of eggshell. She walked the woods chanting from her book. Listening to the silence’s answer. All echo. And the souls of unborn birds sang in her mind for she was their maiden and protector. Butterflies clustered on her lips. And leaves dangled like hands. In offering in benediction in plea. Of her honey drank the mist. Small animals curled against the ache of her breasts and they sucked and drank. And stared into the summer of her eyes.

      Neither here nor not here. Neither there nor not there.

      You woke from your dream gasping for air.

      They sat in order around the table. It was in the age before the microwave. To nourish the family properly required at least one meal per day taken in togetherness. A ritual of napkins and silver. The head and foot traded solemnities for barbs. The peanut gallery tittered on the flanks. Upstaged at every opportunity. Flattered the fertility of the adults. Injunctions prohibitions ejaculations and jibes wrinkled the candles. The kids were never slow to attack. The reward was thunderstorms of laughter. Anger tested in grins and teeth set on the edge of grievance. Into the Yorkshire pudding vanish in delicious savory. Every evening was a festival. It was the high point of each day’s happiness if happiness it was. The kitchen smelled of basil rosemary thyme olive oil bay leaf garlic. Minced onions sautéing in butter. The wolves were kept beyond the firelight for an hour. The thread between the father and the mother was cautiously thrummed the note moving from rumble to trill depending on the day’s mood and pitch. It was examined surreptitiously for fraying. A sudden tension would send the tone out of earshot. The quiet that followed made the small bones in our ears tingle.

      Freeze.

      Entelechy or rebound to the teleology of darkness. Speckled agape like marbles. Overarching the heavens. Unless their peculiar psychology was secure and there were indeed final things. A moment that in a fit or seizure stopped time and split it like a coconut. Big rip. To draw out eternity like milk.

      God to our solitary child had become a rumor what had been a transparence in field and wood the grass-lined roads bluebells tranquilly blossoming in the ditch snapdragons glaring at the honey bees the honeysuckled afternoon beneath a triumph of clouds the eye-like blue of the sky when all all showed him the outlines of a face now he was surrounded by faces each of which was a fragment of an enormous and ongoing burst an endless explosion that created in unnerving delicacy a destructive creation that formed ever new delights to feed its fathomless appetite. But the ugliness of humanity affronted him in the tangles of the city light a light saturated with darkness. The adjuration to seek god in the heart did little good for in his heart was only a narrow spiteful and self-pitying anger. That at times almost suffocated him. He hammered in tearful wrath at the closing walls of his cell. The past was a blinding happiness the future a blank blackness the present a shaft of dirty sunlight. He woke from dream to dream fearing he would never escape into day. They cased him in like a Russian doll. Winked closed clicking like an egg.

      Yet at him inwardly they smiled.

      There was an element of the ridiculous in all this gadding about. Floundering. Like the fish flapping about on the sand by the fisherman’s boot. Of the fishermen no longer near.

      He grew despite everything. No matter how hard he clamped himself down the shackles periodically burst and he had added bulk to his biomass and a ring of experience to what he was hardly old enough to call his past. He was growing. Alarmingly. He looked emphatically backwards because back then he had been happy so he thought. No good. He kept moving forward anyway. There was nothing he could do about it. Except hold on.

      The family was starting to tear light began to appear through the seams. He held his hand rigidly across his eyes. No good either. When life wants to have a nervous breakdown it has one whenever it damn well feels like it. The winds began to gather at the four corners of the map and eyeing him began to slink inwards. Poor fellow. And he had just started to date.

      Annie. Geri. Karin. Caren. Siggy. Lorraine. Barbara. Paula. Leslie. Lesly. Leslee. Ann. Roberta. Nancy. Nancy. Teresa. Kathy. Judy. Meg. Claudia. Mary. Nancy. Margie. Cindy. Linda. Maria. Anne. And more but he couldn’t remember their names. The goal of the date was the kiss. The end of the date was good night. At that time. Sometimes the goal was attained. Miraculous. Interest was however difficult to sustain. Usually an hour in he was looking at the thin Swiss watch with numerous jewels his father had given him without a thought of harm in the world. Then shortly after he walked home unkissed with a sigh of disappointment and relief. Later he would learn there was more than kissing involved. I resisted the idea at the time. But it didn’t help. Later still pride and resentment turned you into something like a monk. Without faith. You learned to extinguish the first spark of tenderness and to be pitilessly polite. This was the beginning of your success with women. On the verge of the end. You smiled at the end beyond the ends of their fingers. It hid for the longest time the unbearable loneliness. From you. So solitary revenge.

      (You’re getting ahead of yourself. You must first sink a fathom at a time into the labyrinth. And try not