A Spy in the Ruins. Christopher Bernard

they might inflict a wound but didn’t try to reopen it. The others ignored the rain and you ignored the others. This could go on for only so long. At the first sign of sun they barreled into the landscape as into an empty and astonished room.

      Confetti falling from a great height.

      Everyone enjoying the parade except the sweepers of course and even they.

      The world was the more intensely bright after weather oh how it shone the air drugged on smells mud grass ditch wood oil stone. You breathed deep. Yet deep. They scattered across the wet ground no one aware of any danger. Except the tedious anxiety of the adults. Their ravenous and tyrannical guilt. Waving frantically from their corners like scarecrows in a gale. Whistling. How you pitied them. Despised them. Jeered. Ran.

      In the great circle of perpetual return.

      Dreaming said the famous doctor who became famous by saying it is the brain’s natural state. If so how unnaturally you have lived. Jamming the mind awake with insistent questions he hadn’t actually wanted answers to there was something oddly calming in the lack as though one were hovering on a jet of air and had no need no immediate need to land. It was the others who insisted on answers serving notice when the answers were of dubious provenance or irrelevant.

      He was bound legally to serve them for twelve years. To answer their questions one way or another and accept their condemnation or praise as given without appeal. To dread the fell F sneer at the common C grovel and sweat for the arrogant A. It suited him despite his pretense at chafing. He loathed what made him live. It was not an unusual state. Carping was a way toward intimacy. How often friendships being based on shared hatreds. The common burdens of loathesome mathematics and famously bad-tempered teachers. The shared smirk on the playground and the innocent look above the school desk. A collective lesson hammered ever so gently home over the decades of supreme conquering delicately tempered hypocrisy. Cemented. The awkward cunning manipulations of childhood beneath the anxieties and tantrums. The craven innocence of a hungry and cruel mind.

      And the uncanniness of looking back at it.

      “An answered question’s hell” he found scribbled in the margin of an old school notebook one vacant afternoon in his uncontrolled hand.

      This dream then. Much later oh much. Collected in bouts of waking like rain in cisterns. A crowded street fair. Tiny eateries jammed with eaters. You motion down the way for a friend indicating a certain spot in the middle distance. You consider the time time for a chat time for a coffee time for a beer time to be going to take the walk in the countryside you have been promising yourself in hope to find there the solution to a problem that won’t leave you alone you had almost given up but someone else engages your attention it’s your father you have a miraculously pleasant talk with him as you stray by the side of the street unable to get away he is amiable and you are charming and you cannot escape and you think how soon the night will come and the problem will never be solved so be it it has been a lovely day and I have done nothing I hoped to do. And so it goes on crowded and eventful full of character and incident from end to end of its short life not quite coherent but giving the sense of a consistent if sometimes hidden narrative from beginning to end yet there is something before the beginning and there is something after the end at least that is suggested and it seems plausible doesn’t it just like life itself any life it almost adds up and is certainly very interesting and almost actually makes sense. The water in the cistern being very pure here and reflecting almost perfectly if a little dimly your face and the clouds behind it. As you bend down to drink.

      At the far corner of his eye she. Vanishing when he turns. Ghost at noon. Less than memory or hope. A flicker. Binge of wishful thinking hallucination of the groin. Yet he is so sure he saw. Eyes as bright as. Lips as soft as. A mind crackling with wrath and laughter sudden in rage and in tears. A body softer than tighter than. Profile sharp as. Hands that took and gave gave. Look both blunt and pure. Spell of honesty and longing. Schöne schein. Utter illusion worth every truth in the world so he you I thought at the time. Insanely thought it could be for him for anyone so willing to be made the fool. And was if he were willing to suffer. And did. And still refused to learn the lesson repeated again and again to his stubborn and hopeful mind. As he threw himself against the ice. And again.

      Who could she have been?

      Something like memory reborn. In the open palm. A turning leaf. Summer not quite forgotten. Though the edges curl inward and are brown. Hand to hand. Wet with dew. In hand. The heart of it yellowing and the veins. Brittlely clear. As though he could see through them. Toward spring. Behind. And the coming snow.

      You have not learned your lesson. Flunk. The shock of it. He who is used to nothing less than. Even when he doesn’t. And he hasn’t. So foolishly certain in love’s blind knowledge that he had. It. Her. Forgetting how treacherous was the calculus of affection how perverse the transforming into memory of obsession. The eel between his hands as it shook. The blank despising in her cold flat eyes.

      The books. Crack them. Sink into them. Breathe them let them absorb and for the time being become you. Vanish from the scene into your paper cell. Raise the spine to her in defiance the white blind wall. The crenellated tower of words. Repeat over and over the student’s hopeless mantra. Despise yourself and collect all A’s. Amaze. Astonish. Astound. Allure. Avenge. Appal. Adore.

      Nights of the lamp. Days of mockery. The expectant uneasiness of twilight. He tasted little despairs in that confusion of dusk hour of danger and magic when others are as poorly defined as oneself. And moves through them like a ghost into a ghost. Away however toward or in.

      They were not impressed. His twisting into random knots of lyrical confusion his half-desperate flights of fancy shot from a gun of self-regard at heart targets dispersed on a diagrammatic field made them yawn at the futility of it. Snipped into topiaries of self. Never was the lecture of silence and sarcasm more pointless or fed to deafer ears. For longer. Giggles and sneers. He tried to give it up in the end. He tried to give it up in the beginning. His body was stubborn it would not give up its pride. It failed like the worm on its barb refusing to believe it was already dead. As good as. Thinking the heave toward the surf was its launch into flight.

      The heart must always be broken. Again. No no no he kept shouting no. No. And the world echoed Yes.

      The school was a larger safety zone shared by others. That leaked at its borders a keen sweet threatening scent flickering flamelessly in the air. The anxious daydream of an explosion. Fingering its way through the cries in the playground. Invading slowly eating in. It seemed safe at the time behind the scapular slate. Its mossy almost oleaginous mineral green. A scrim of ice over a face in a pond.

      The school was a colony of the outer world setting up a freehold in his mind. The hall monitors watched over their charges with fatuous authority. They were being led into a world not theirs but to be theirs. They were being misfitted for the world outside. In this (you thought) particular school.

      For the world outside was reflected here through a complex apparatus of distorting mirrors. What was shown was what was believed what was believed ought to be shown to minds still innocent and needing above all hope (you thought). Not what was believed what was believed was actually there there in the world outside (you thought). For that was barely endurable by adults. Indeed was not endurable by adults (you thought). Hence their need for fairy tales to feed their young. Half hoping they would believe them half hoping they might relieve one by one the misery they condoned or had learned to ignore with more or less set teeth and a defensive pretense at cynicism or simply could not fight or simply could not face. If (you thought). If they believed the tales. If they held on despite the hecatomb beyond the school fence. The cries of the animals and the people in the streets. The slaughter they would witness and the scars they would grow like flowers in gardens of promise. O the noble hopelessness in the sad eyes of the teachers!

      There was after all still this strange belief in education. It was shared by almost everyone. It served to your mind two functions one to weed out the losers two to give everyone a chance to lose. Even when you won. Heady stuff! Though you considered it very strange. It was a field of carnage and blood beneath the waxen smile of the teacher.