A Spy in the Ruins. Christopher Bernard

      What the maze saw. At the crooked ends of the turnoff. Toward a downtown pillaged by pain. Its eyes round with amazement.

      The ubiquitousness of frustration and unhappiness everywhere parading as contented satisfaction with life’s unendurable awfulness the militant aggressive stupidity of this peculiar form of denial impressed him repeatedly. The dismaying insistence on cheerfulness at all costs at the very least teeth gritted in smiles. A frank weary fatigue and sadness seemed preferable certainly more appealing and easier to sit across in the ill-lit cafe. Even angry harping bitterness was better than relentless good cheer the unfurling of the vast banners of. Triumph. Over the corpse-strewn battleground.

      The rat-eaten heart of the city had this merit that of an obscene yet stimulating honesty. One could not grin it out of countenance.

      But it took you a long time to discover this.

      In the meantime the history of his innocence left him deaf and blind to the moral lessons hanging from every corner of the prison yard he was stuck in.

      He pushed his way through the filth with a sense he had been betrayed.

      As you have been.

      He was hanging by the neck until he was dead. It was a highly elastic noose made of crepitantly asphyxiating bungee and could afford to take its time. Quite a bounce.

      Adolescence. Etc.

      The greater fool.

      Partook of the ingredients on jar labels and cereal boxes. The romance copy sent him out of his mind for minutes at a time.

      You were always being tripped up by your knack for believing. Skepticism was a lesson that never quite held. Till it held all. Becoming for a time a personal brand. Furious-flavored fanaticism. The torch he bore to justify his misery. And infiltrate the sty happiness of everybody else. The twerp!

      He was not going to not believe again. In anything.

      (This came later but its roots were as those of the weed in the rended mat of grass near his sneakers. If you did not kill the last fibre of that innocent-looking yellow-headed coin of vulgar flower it would grab and twist and grasp and throttle the entire acre. Bobbing dead white heads in a week. Choking anything that is not they. Seeding unrelenting downwind.)

      As it did.

      Cynical with devotion.

      Meanwhile he carried his solitude with him like a badge ready to flash it at certain officious and suspiciously interested females. It was a white star on his flannel jacket.

      They never did get the message.

      It was a form of happiness not vouchsafed to all they must keep him at the edge of their eyes but go no further. This way his solitude became peopled without collapsing into desperate loneliness for long. Desperation being the tone of the hour a foregone conclusion between futile experiments. Stabs at being. Oneself again.

      And dwelled uneasily on the image in the mirror the one he followed for decades the purest contemplation from end to end of the spectrum of his life. Odd. Not that it was a pretty face but it was yours. You were stuck to the back of it and dangled like a hidden photographer under the black cloth of an antique camera shouting at the top of your lungs “Don’t move!” at the hapless model relentlessly blurring.

      Funny. She remained nameless behind the whirring fan of names. Such a smile granted to few. A luxury long longed for the taste a crumb of dazzlement.

      One carried it away and hoarded it and gazed at the memory for days watching it fade into a hard small crystal of promise. Perhaps today the small morning light twittered. Or tomorrow. Anything could happen. And would. And shall. Defend hope from every foe. Family. And friend.

      The family swirled with false laughter around the quiet one the solitary one the child. Who missed many cues that way. Waiting far too hard.

      He could only open his eyes to objects in half darkness and alone. They did not rebuff him. Yet. Or only his contemplation. The handling with its barbs would come later.

      There was you see too much anger in the laughter that surrounded him. It hurt his eyes like too bright a light. The eyes winced tingling. As if from photophobia. It made him feel naked and jeered at. Ashamed of being still there.

      Yet you must fight back not let your own happiness be plowed into the soil of their. For them to. Flourish.

      So he inched the ice into his face. Gave nothing. Watched as their fingers slipped down the wall their eyes bewildered with frustration. Eye to eye with cold blankness. Saved the fire for the anxious core. Foolishly oh foolishly but helpless.

      You had to save yourself. From them all it seemed. Or but only seemed. Which was enough.

      Foolishly oh foolishly.

      Not to know a better way to remove the burden he could not bear for long. Yet had to.

      The monkey blinking from his shoulder in the mirror.

      No way to enter adolescence. Retreating.

      The memory of a clump of trees. Where you could hide. Chanting the name of a teacher.

      Miss Schmeg.

      Which made you think of nutmeg its sweet nutty smell.

      Miss Schmeg smell of nutmeg.

      He hoped her for his future. Where was she now. Nowhere but in my past. What he remembered did not exist. This was why it was remembered. It was the inflexible law. To find her again would have been intolerable.

      The city thickened. What happened here did not exist what he remembered did not exist what would happen tomorrow anywhere did not exist. And nothing in between the empty points of time.

      You stared from the bed at the ceiling. You stared through the branches at the sky.

      In silence.

      Vanishing.

      Panicking

      Ever?

      Ever.

      It wasn’t exactly practical to be the way he was. But he was stubborn. Surrounded by fences (he remembered) he had sat still at the center of the grass. Breathing the cuttings.

      Beyond the fences was a chaos of traffic in the angry heat of summer.

      Calculation was possible given time in some cases. Of the general shape that is. Of no individual however. I took comfort from that from the incalculability of my own trajectory across the. What. Shavings of dust. Quadrille of the infra-red. Captious swirl of enormous smoke in endless rooms of gigantic night.

      It was curious how when all was said and done it looked the starry night when examined through the haze of photographs gotten many years later from the infra-red and other amazing telescopes hanging and looping above the sky it looked like well an infinitely enormous drop of muddy pond water undefined and blind and turgid and snaking and filthy and brown and irritably alive. Eating itself. Anxious. Opaque. Strangely frisky. An infinite tangle of spectacularly encoiled ouroboroi each encircling its own thousand-dimensioned universe eating then spewing out all the others. In turn. Out of turn. Simultaneously. Beyond the limits of beyond the spider-ice of light.

      But he did not know that then. Could not see that then. All he saw above him were the endless phalanxes of the clouds marching marching across the blueness like Romans flashing in splendor. Or hanging over you soft as a woman’s skin. Smelling tartly of earth and sky. Or high in ice like vast dragonfly wings stretching between rings of the horizon. Or mackereled in tufts of snow-like drifts and pillows of whiteness. Or gray and shapeless and sombre pierced with folds of illusory light. The sun snagging in sheets of tearing fog.

      Between these clouds which he could see and those clouds he could scarcely imagine he had closed his eyes (he remembered) and let the moscae wander.

      There was much laughter in that household despite what has been said nor was it all anger. It would be a mistake to call