A Spy in the Ruins. Christopher Bernard

In the ink of ash of starlight.

      The heretics’ fading cries.

      Mr. Grabman gave it a look of deep puzzlement. But it survived. After all you looked so innocent.

      Repeat lesson. The slippery ground of everything. Learned early learned late or learned not at all. Repeat lesson. Archetypal category of its own unambiguously labeled total ambiguity. Yes? As though a film of oil covered things. Slipped into the cracks between words. Denied contact. Except with itself. Where rest where there is no rest rest in the restlessness. The human animal was a porous sack of fatty tissue and dread. He thought at one point later. Only the slipperiness could be counted on he thought forgetting his own stubborn will. That shook but would not give. True it was a strange way to be unjust to your peers. But it became his way. He is rarely disappointed when underestimating them. Their motives. They will provide decades of amusement unless you’re a victim of idealism. Unfortunately if you expect. And have the tragic flaw of having a tragic sense. Beneath the dome. In the upper tier of the amphitheater. With the cries of the vendors drifting up to you. And the backs of so many heads lined up in descending crescents from you. Toward the spectacle.

      As here on the first day. Minor sideshow in the greatest etc. But his own therefore noted. Peeling into his generation which he loathed as others loathe their families. But not yet. The first day of school first day in the punishment room. First the instruments are shown. And you have no idea what they are they look like ingeniously crafted toys. Look my thumbs can go in here. They let them lie around so you get used to seeing them. Hearing the shrieks. No longer noticing or only vaguely wondering. Or congratulating your friends on having escaped. Narrowly. Everyone quite cheerful otherwise. Trading sarcasms and clueless smirks. The quiet patient efficient undercut. As the cries from the neighboring rooms pierce to you. Louder it seems than last time. But you’re afraid to ask. What if they look at you and ask what screams? As they sanded the point of a more radiant shaft in the dry woody smell of shop. Shaking a head at you in pity between buffs.

      Till you no longer trust your senses. And slip into the prison of their words.

      Grass stains on the khakis. A kite above the swings. Thick round pencils olive and soft. Their smell. The thrill and the wall of that first day. The solitary one no longer solitary or so he thought. For a moment or perhaps longer. Till the unwelcome in the other eyes welled away to. Scum on a stagnant pond. Parrying. The quick twitch of the rapier. The touch and crumble to the floor. Ironically crass the brittle arch comments the attempts to be smart and rude. Your own timidity was no excuse your penchant for self-protective pridefulness only worsened. Silly and spiteful in your own way. The meanness a shared facility. On the first day however he saw it for the first time tacked in large black lettering on the wall. The warning. Vague and bloody-minded. There shall be war between us. Troubling the wall above the bulletin boards between photos from Life and Look and Norman Rockwell. Monsters with names and deceptively caught expressions. The delusion that this time we will not be above all you will not be fooled. The curse of the generations. As we launched grandly at our very own our unique our industriously cultivated bred and groomed our carefully dressed our meticulously coiffed our perfectly hip and extremely cool. His. Your. My. Mindlessnes. So far ahead to come. So far! As we sat at the first grade table gritting our teeth at each other. With innocent disdain.

      The fisherman pulled suddenly up. Taut. Something leaping beyond the breakers furiously shaking the barb further in. Catch. The bullet ball. Rebound. The click of the rod as the fisherman ratchets the hooked fish. The plastic mange of sand. The rod nodding like a polite bird. Violent flapping in the surf. Shouts of relay between the four. Then five. Then three. Then two alone. The exhausted blue heaving in the foam the sand dragging into its gills its terrified eye’s blind in the suffocating air. Lurch up into the hand the rip of the barb out and the plummet into the bucket. Got three today. Then four. Then five. Then none. You missed. The sound of the tail slashing against the side in weakening flourishes. Gone still. Softly panting. Staring at bucket bottom and sky. As the girl skitters away with a laugh.

      A moment of bliss followed by years of misery. So he discovered later. Which he was then too young to imagine. The obscenity of the trick. Unless it was none. And the old wisdom was right after all. Mean but clear sighted. Do not touch the moistness outside the ring. Through the ring. On the other side of the ring. Impanelled angels yet away. Their wings shuffling in the stalls. As they listened with bored air to the testimony. Like a therapist the nattering obsessive. Whatever the question always the same answer. In the same words. The same inflections. Talismanically. Over and over. In the vaults of his inheritance. The chromosomal chains never to free at last. Curling inward to the final link.

      The damned words.

      Scenario taken as read.

      The lesson the quiz ignored heaven the sky within the mind hell the fire between the thighs.

      But truth is both hard to find and not always immediately persuasive it needs to be hammered in with a knout. Hung at the side of the blackboard. The movable one. So that it swung as the blackboard was moved from place to place at the head of the classroom. Reminding the slow among them what their heads might need. Periodic bashing. To help the little truth sink in. Like a staple through a thick wad. Convincing the stubborn among them at last. Of what had never seemed entirely plain. But an evasive deception. Ringing changes on the sadism and paranoia that together form the basis of every society whose acquaintance he would make in decades to come its culture being the pathological construction society imposes on its members as a form of intellectual and emotional regimentation sadism both its supreme entertainment and its preferred method of instruction though usually subtilized into simple dread for example of failure therefrom social even economic ostracism and its recruits among the wreckage in the streets. So they said at the time. Not said dared not say but but would one day think in a moment of startling brightly illuminated black. As they looked on the animals gathered in the snow. At the bottom of the playground. Among the dead weeds. So many beaten dogs.

      But then the place was back-training in failure the best kind first fail at small things then progress to larger and more ambitious until one has mastered the skills ensuring success will not snatch you but grappled to the ground or bayoneted to the plank or tossed the grenade will ensure its immediate neutralization. Even success in such a place brings all the shame of failure as though once again you had failed at keeping yourself secret and unknown. Unhidden the eye that pins you with all its congratulations to the wall. He was shredded with approval yet all he wanted was the acknowledgment of his teachers he had soon learned to hold his peers in contempt what you could not hide was how you despised them. Not good politics. Their malice. Their ignorance. Their laziness. Their arrogance. Their moral cowardice. Which in decades to come would blossom. Discharge. Like an infected cyst. And in which you would find yourself flecked like a splinter of glass. Revealed. Not having avoided the pitfalls listed. Any of them. Thrilling to the kazoo of defeat buzz buzz. The astonishing ludicrousness of failure.

      Writhing around you in the white carton with the little handles on the hook pack not far from the hipboots of the fisherman. Slippery. Irritable. The twitch of muscle riding from a spot behind the neck to the tail rolling spasm completed in a little hopeless flick you could almost hear the tiny cries. As the fisherman picked another up and smoothed it onto his hook. “It doesn’t feel a thing” he said as you looked at the wet shiny inch of brown. Flail. At the end of the tackle. That he then heaved beyond the surf. Past the breakers. The line spinning. Then yanked stiff. Out of the writhing nest of fingers. Waiting.

      Then woke from his daydream and stared down at the uncompleted calculation.

      They irritated each other while they waited. Exposing scars lifting unhealed wounds. The rain had not let up since morning. It felt cozy and abandoned. Droplets trickled in crooked paths along the window to little pockets of water until a big one plunged to the sill. In a path that reminded you of forked lightning. Some played guessing which would be next. I had always wondered why the rain clung only to parts of the window little archipelagos unless there was an emulsion and the result was a silken sheen with long shallow swells and a filmy patchwork of refractions of rainbow the light beyond alive iridescently.

      Your safety from others was thus in concentrating on objects