A Spy in the Ruins. Christopher Bernard

was a kind of elegant giddiness in the air that put a sheen over contention. A sense of specialness of welcoming and open-minded exclusiveness an exclusiveness that paradoxically excluded no one but invited and entertained everyone and only felt a slight pity they couldn’t stay in the magic circle where gaiety and the golden future lived and traded jokes and looked out on the world as a field where pleasures might bud berries of joy drop one at a time at perfectly gauged intervals to perfectly hungry fingers. A world self-contained yet airy and light filled with elegant furnishings good books thrilling music beautiful pictures audacious and satisfying entertainments exquisite dinners wonderful stories the prospect of exciting travels an insouciant optimism a certainty of contentment a world that opened from blossom to blossom till the entire tree dazzled like a garden filling the air with the bracing scent of happiness.

      A smile for the future a smile for the past. The present a flushed leap between hope and gratitude.

      There was no reason it could not continue forever. When he thought about it calmly and alone. In his room stretched out on his bed. Or walking solitary and happy under the evening.

      The humiliation behind the photograph’s smile.

      Now.

      If there ever was a then.

      For there seemed to be movement. Like a python uncurling from its knot in the branches of the lamp.

      A slick if slightly mangy lattice for it was shedding.

      Uncurling down to your hand.

      The impetus of time thus letting itself be felt against the uncalloused palm.

      Seeking to wrap around the arm an affectionate or merely voracious tendril.

      Around the shoulders around the rib cage and pelvis a helix linking groin through heart to head the eyes unblinking above the lined forehead the forked tongue tasting the random air.

      Becoming your eyes.

      (He considered this as he (as you) (as I) moved what were at one time eyes across these words just written and paused to consider the slowly darkening paper.

      The scaled cord slipping across the eyes …)

      Yes there was much happiness between the troubles.

      The afternoon at the river along the lightly sloping banks under the wide-spaced trees the thick layers of pebbles beneath their feet cold and sharp and giggly. Moving into the water was an adventure yes slipping here and there on the river-bottom rocks fuzzed with slime there was the thought of water mocassins between the shouts echoing across the surface and the chuff of water against the bank. Everybody was laughing at everybody else. It was charged with teasing the innocently treacherous ridicule yes the generous and exhilarating sarcasm of a fathomless security. The towel flicked back and forth in little punishments of joy. Yes aggression itself was a signature of complicity the bonding of a conspiracy against the world. It gave happiness its spine. There was nothing to lose and everything to gain. Was that the secret of childhood’s happiness its sometimes desperate calm? Yes?

      They crouched giggling on the long flat rock above the river daring each other off into the first plunge.

      (Not yet not yet oh hold to the rock for the sun will set and the sun will set at the fall of the eyes at the edge of the hand while the waters suck you down yes ride you like a lover devour you with unforgiving desire.)

      The air rushing through the car.

      Brother and sister asleep beside you.

      The smell of cut grass horse manure the occasional dead skunk wet earth of bark and leaves humus of the woods scented bushes whipping in through the open car windows also the smell of gasoline vinyl rust a smell of dried sweat.

      The blur and rush of trees on either side of the road behind them farms and valleys streams and fields in ragged scattered sleeping herds of dairy cows and horses hen houses self-conscious and startled leaning pig sties noble nonagonal barns white-walled and field stone farmhouses all in a combination of near-view rush and farther view stately procession and farthest view near immobility at the point where hilltop became the ridge of a horizon halting the sky.

      And the pale clouds reflecting the sun above them staring into endlessness like a blind and irrefutable benediction.

      Sun and clouds and the brazen cars.

      … and opened his eyes out of memory again and took in what he had to of the pale surround of his present.

      It was fleeting furtive might have been painless had it not been for the edge of light pursuing a remorse that had no clear justification. It stabbed him periodically and at awkward moments. An inconvenient and uninformative demon. It was like a hot coal shifting in his shoe. It made him dance with feverish spastic movements and sparkling laughter from his peers.

      The look in their eyes of merciless contempt and joy in their power and the white horseshoes of their grins made him wonder.

      It was feeding time in the playgrounds.

      His teachers stalked blind and unbending above the pint-sized mayhem indifferent and bureaucratic and booming like foghorns. They watched the bullying from the corners of their eyes with shirt-fronted satisfaction.

      The only shield against mortification and despair was to sheathe the face in stone and stand in the margins of the yard unmoving and taking everything in.

      The coal against the foot quietly gaining.

      (6 × 7 × … what is it now … 45,301 ÷ … let’s see … (2 × forever)… plus … + 8) the whole minus infinity … and whatever happened to the primes …

      Taking so long to learn the tables of shame.

      Pass. Pass on. Pass out. Pass over. Pass away. Pass the course. Pass the buck. Just please God let me pass.

      (He walked the halls of school murmuring blasphemies.)

      Aloft.

      Cast your eye where you’ve never been.

      Here. Now. Nowhere.

      Pencils of planes move against the clouds.

      Lost in abstraction. Like the retelling.

      Thinking behind the emphatic blue irresolutions of shadow.

      Eyebeams from which they hang like plotting ecstatic school boys paper angels mouths alarmed with praise children in the dark whispering stories.

      Spastic.

      Flinching.

      Resigned.

      For the dead power whose fingers spin their wings.

      Their fathers.

      The wombs that sucked them out.

      The vortices.

      Up there.

      Beyond this.

      Not beyond this.

      Surrounding and subtending it like a cord an arc of the infinite circle whose center cannot be found.

      Has not been found. Yet.

      Your eye.

      The top starting to wobble.

      The family drama skittered around the edges of historical catastrophe. Mice panicking on the imperilled vessel. Or rather sandpipers bickering in the skirts of the runoff over a few shreds of crab and worm.

      When the sudden tide thrust out showing wards of kelp colonies of crustaceans hospitals of coraline monstrosity uncovered to an irrelevantly dissecting light. A bit late in the day. Kaleidoscope of seabirds. Burrowing sand crabs in a tide pool. A quiver of anxiety half hidden fingering the fletches. The fishermen looking up startled from their daydream. The smell of women on their hands. The wall of water lurching above them unscaleable bright curling down to them. A roar of ten thousand trains.

      All