A Spy in the Ruins. Christopher Bernard

mother

      whom you have never known

       Contents

       Chapter 1

       Chapter 2

       Chapter 3

       Chapter 4

       Chapter 5

       Chapter 6

       Chapter 7

       Chapter 8

       Chapter 9

       Chapter 10

      1

      Dazzling.

      Light from every compass point.

      In the outback at the edge of the frontage road the sky opens like a long-clenched fist. Offering a suddenness of generous blue and constantly changing clouds. Or reaching out to sternly grab someone’s hand. Or pointing to an error in a serene-looking notebook. Or about to slap someone’s frightened cheek. Or …

      Are we ready for the next lesson have we learned anything from the last. The eyes blink rapidly they can’t take it all in. Frozen watching. Waiting. Vast perspectives on all sides. There is no end to the horizon.

      Who is in control here? You or you or you? Someone overtaken someone taking over. Surprised as the egg of the lark spiraling up to nimbo-cumulus imagined from inside the shell… .

      You are unseen but guessed at.

       Shh, he’s finally sleeping now, leave him, let him sleep, go, go …

      You think so do you let him forget. But he can’t forget. Ah where is senility when you finally need it… .

      Behind the rivulets of laughter ice and the smell of sex the list of humiliations I went over each night before I slept.

      No. Hosannas… .

      A narcissus in a small clear bowl. Yes that.

      On every side the boundaries were collapsing. At the time. The border guards stood like torches of pitch. You were drawn without your knowing it. Into the conspiracy.

      The net flying beyond its reach. Adenine guanine cytosine thymine. Cartilage cleaver bone. Shell. Cage. Jail. Wings.

      Into the tide …

      O the astonishing novelty of dawn.

      The screen goes blank with beauty it was so great a joy we vanished.

      A spare swath of light crosses the hallway table. That!

      Why we could never quite remember the lesson and so must keep repeating it.

      The head has no voice only whispers furtive signatories to the treaty you made with the past. Hand-flocked mail sent to a blocked address and the cartouche that will not disappear from the monitor screen.

      The solitary one moves across the bottom of the aquarium collecting trace bubbles rising from the oxygenator… . A glint of bluefish through the tidewater… . The air rising from two open hands… .

      What you remember what he remembers is the pain in detail it cannot have been all suffering you reasoned why can’t I remember the happiness.

      Let the door pull you through. As you approach the threshold you grow immense and slow never to be seen to attain it.

      If esse est percipi you will not ever be.

      As you dive into the shadowy heart of the rose. A cross fleur-de-lys on a banner. A tide of grasses moving over a plain. The boy not seen that day… .

       I think he’s really sleeping now. His eyelids are quivering. Yes, of course, if you like. Stay.

      Take the turnoff to Lock among the ghost towns in the hills beyond the city.

      See the shadow of a condor. From April to November waterless earth. The sun nailed at noon. Creek beds smooth as.

      The counterpane you can see it from above knobby with hill ranges like the knees of teenagers sleeping in the hot afternoon. A Cessna whirrs oblique to the horizon. Whistles sound in the burdock glen. The birds are strangers to me you announced. The keys clattered to the floor.

      The peculiar range of sound in the country the chuff of tractors I could almost hear you from there. The exhilarating scent of compost. There were many horses but they were all silent. An open palm shining with moisture. The woods arched over me like hands. Pale as. Dark as. Thought of winter at the center of summer brightness. A daydream of snow. Flash of water skis an arm waving. The roar of the motorboat beyond the jetty. At the heart of the winter dream in the silence of summer the memory of other summers cocooned in snow. The taste of seawater. Everywhere… .

      The soft hour of the sandpiper in the distance the pier that collapsed section by section over the decades but never entirely fallen.

      The ship’s log lying open in the antechamber.

      Coordinates in parallax psychopomps terns.

      Whitecaps.

      A thin layer of sand on the linoleum a bend in the tide reflecting the clouds. Foam crowns the shell of a horseshoe crab lying on the beach like the helmet of the fabled dead German soldier. With tail.

      Retorts. Why retorts?

      The fumes cleared the chemistry wing in long-lost adolescence why that now.

      The shouts of the walking psychotics as they scream in the night. That you should pity but can’t except in retrospect.

      A tangle of undercurrents the Portuguese man-o’-war the sharks. Airborne. Off the port of tempests. Cape Hatteras and the flight to the islands of Malatesta and the coast of. Campana the call of the horns. The review closed with a corps of dancers strutting to strident reprises of Semper Fi. Consume your reserves in the night. That you have been given many of. Gifts.

      Our altars burned with offerings. The hammers formed a circle their handles point toward the center. A suspicious stare at the passport the airline ticket your shoes your look of innocence that no longer convinces it could be anyone. Here. Now. The fog closing in. A flare of coins a string of buoys. A plangent moan as of a snoring giant the sheet shifting over the harbor of his bed.

      Oh what was his name? Nomen Dubium. Or nomina nuda!

      The solitary one removes his hand.

      A velocipede is overturned in the driveway.

      Representations of social power in the land of the living were inflected through docile bodies panopticon of the net Argus made supreme polymorphous perverse expressed through the search for the multiple orgasm. Again. To erase the assertive I and the it. Parry riposte. Hit. Do not spare the heart. Whip. Tied to the finials of a bed. The humiliations the too-powerful pay for. The sexuality of the atom was to implode. We had a wanton tenderness phemes of repulsion and a drive toward nescience. We were counting bone samples in the art department. For catastrophe theory how the mosquito’s wings in the Maldives upset the tech stock rates on Nasdaq. A tear in the unified field. As collapsible as charm. Toward a cast party in the Balkans. Or the collapse of Bam. Or where the road for Cabeza de Vaca spanned. The bain-marie spilled on the countergirl’s