A Spy in the Ruins. Christopher Bernard

swat. Evenings were hecatombs of paper and pencils. His natural laziness was flattered by the ease with which he conquered his homework and excited his teachers with the cunning nonsense of his compositions in English and his date-perfect responses in history.

      Arithmetic was more lugubrious and science a meticulous bore until one Christmas you were given a chemistry set with microscope and proceeded to kill ants for examination and blow up test tubes of intricately frothing cocktails.

      Exploration and experiment these were your watchwords talismans for happiness in your hermit-like room.

      Interrupted by dinner the elaborate feasts jest-fests off-the-cuff lectures quick-hand attacks of hard little truth delivered with a grin and obliquely adult chronicles of the public relations firm where your father worked and the more mysterious affairs of the household when the house breathed a kind of nocturnal existence in daylight when you were at school. Then the troop to the TV den while you increasingly kept to the chemical studious and musical haunt of your room.

      For you were left alone to explore the new contents of your discoveries. To get lost as you did alone a little frightened and deeply attentive.

      You turned inward like a screw and kept your joys perversely to yourself.

      Not as if you had not tried to share the little flecks of opal and sapphire you found among the books and recordings of your father’s choice library. But like as not their value was an acquired taste and those around you seemed to prefer more usual stuff. The insipidities of television. The brutality of sports. The radio’s static crooning.

      Though your parents pretended otherwise.

      This was bewildering. Reality was scorned as pretense the pretense respected as reality (so he thought). It was enough to make one go mad or philosophical.

      He went both.

      Wrapped in silence. Furtive withdrawn watchful intense inept serious and sincere at the wrong moments sarcastically comic at impossible ones.

      He made them uneasy himself above all.

      Every other week he shed a skin and grew a new interest. Your eyes are bigger than your stomache mother who was not his mother told him whenever he was unable to finish his third helping.

      It was as though he wanted to eat the world from different positions at the dinner table.

      He was fascinated by the word understanding.

      He had perfect faith it could be acquired.

      It was only a question of accumulation and openness. And time that treasure chest of fire.

      Adulthood would be an era of ever-deepening understanding.

      To understand was to stand. At the edge of the sea on the crest of the mountain and survey earth ocean clouds and sky in a single sweep of the mind.

      It was stronger than power it was deeper than knowledge it was even deeper than love.

      He stood on the little hill in the piles and serenely overlooked the halted excavations and the gray hard fields the lure of the woods the little boxes of houses plunked down by the country road and the hills rolling away behind thickening screens of dimness in the far distance to the east.

      It would grow only richer forever.

      He was sure of that at least of that.

      How it thrilled him.

      That certainty.

      The legacy that awaited him.

      It came as something of a surprise to learn that the will was written in invisible ink. So much trickier the task of deciphering a text on a blank and tumultuous page.

      The darkening halls.

      At the far ends splashes of linoleum light.

      Noisy crowds of shadows through which you pitch and scuttle.

      Small acid comments.

      The relentless cynicism of children. In the trap.

      Yellow stains of light on the ceiling.

      Silent teachers wading through the crowd clasping papers to their chests and looking absent.

      Little notes of cheer and increasing laughter as the day wore on toward last class.

      Classrooms like dusty jewelry cases with the students lined up in their disingenuous settings glinting dully toward the teacher.

      The utterly secure orderliness and boredom of it fractured by the occasional menace of a test.

      At the end of each year the automatic notch into the next grade.

      Twelve in all divided into three.

      With the thrill of college waving you on from the other side.

      Then the triumph of adulthood the victorious career the woman you love the children you will teach your wisdom to all the gains you have made in your ever-deepening understanding the magnificent house the mobs of friends the enviable reputation and travels to the most exotic lands a progress of triumphs the sheer excitement of the world in your hands the world welcoming you like a lover like a potentate like a conqueror it would all come as naturally as breathing.

      You remember a time in early childhood you snatch eggs from under a gaggle of chickens and place them in your basket braving the defiant squawks and indignant pecking and then waddle back to the kitchen under the white load heavy and fragile feeling very proud of yourself the smiles and cheers on every side as you raise the basket in the brilliant kitchen and walk up to the table now one more step and totter to the oh look at him edge grinning yourself now totter up to the edge again oh look of the tabletop in the totter to the smiling with one more time totter up to the victory look at him then

       oh no down they go!

      (and all that scalding laughter!)

      But this sums nothing up.

      Katy’s hot pink nipples in the white of her skin bathed in the light through her blouse her fingers holding the neck of it open she laughs giddily into your ear your vague feeling of disappointment for they looked so like your own only pinker there was nothing particularly special about them why was everyone including you so excited about seeing them? The boys had gathered at the edge of the woods at the edge of the playground whispering among themselves “Katy’s going to show her titties.” It seemed very exciting at first many of them never having seen a girl’s naked chest before. You had seen your sister’s naked dumpling torso with its little nipples and smooth cloven groin and thought nothing much of it also your mother who was not your mother which seemed more formidable and troubling pasty lunar globes massive florid aureoles and a wilderness of black between her thighs also your great aunt once great wrinkled sagging dugs and brush of graying fur between her legs disgusting and vaguely terrifying her breasts were bigger than your head. Nudity was neither flaunted nor hidden in your household it happened without coyness between bedroom and bath you often shared a pee with your father in the john glancing timidly at the monstrous shaggy penis next to your shoulder and jiggling your own petite hairless willy in mock imitation. So why the silly excitement over Katy yet it was so. The anticipation as always everything a setup for disappointment it would not be the last time you were disappointed in a woman. When the boys giggled knowingly about something they called screwing you were not taken in it was too preposterous. You could not imagine your father and mother who was not your mother in such a silly position. Although you had been masturbating since early childhood you couldn’t imagine doing it in any sense with a partner. You would be too embarrassed. For the rest of your life. As it turned out. You always to be happier or if not that more content alone than with any other human being. Lecturing the ceiling. Whispering stories to the pillow. Daubing the air with fairy tales. Delivering angry and eloquent speeches to the hushed and silent walls. A helix twisiting madly in a pure crystal cube. Turning your room into a universe. You both darkness and sun and the terrifying embrace of the stars. Oh that vast gale. As you nursed your body and mind with ever-faithful tenderness. Your own lover. Loyal beast