A Spy in the Ruins. Christopher Bernard

corridors trying door after locked door. The candle going out in a draft before the turn in the mirror. In which for a moment you saw. The only faithful one.

      Schooled to a hard and useless edge. At that time. For a time. Against females! Their uncanniness. He thought a fake beauty that hid alkaline smells a mucoid formlessness hysteria of uncertain identity boundaryless entanglement with the air a constant threat of dissolution like jellyfish though less symmetrical wedding themselves to totems of Beauty and slipping away like pools of mercury he was made uneasy by (he thought) their lack of definition a certain shapelessness hungry attachment yet didn’t know how much they troubled him he was being shoved into nature’s trap and the gaudy circuitry of sex the trap was being laid inside him in the arcana of his torso at the base of the abomination swinging from his belly he was being sucked down a drain bored out behind his navel girls were becoming less vials of pride and irritation and more probing and manipulative egg reservoirs of epidermal magnetism organs of dark vacuum with wet holes between their legs the objects of a deathly longing the tools of nature’s perpetual self-creation and destruction tyrants of desire. In their eyes he thought he could see they were aware of this it seemed to them their natural right and any rebel against it invited torture and execution it was enough to make him declare war against them. At that time. Like the long arms of the man-o’-war they enfolded him in a stinging clasp blindly caressing and absently murderous. Fear and anger were his only weapons fear kept him apart anger startled awake their fear. So they ran away to their opposite and opposing universes passing annihilating glares between them. Nothing formed. There was nothing to attach to in that slippery blindness however hectic and overwrought. The hormones provided their own antidote in aimless panic. It was horrifyingly funny yet so close to the bone it was infinitely remote. Imagine wrestling with a rabid dog made of honey and phlegm. Every so often one would peel off from the pack and pursue him. Bacchante of the playgrounds. For nothing he could recall he had ever done. Or intended. Abruptly surrounding him a suddenness of girl. Scampering frock and mary janes. Giggles and screams and frank goggle eyes. Conferences of skirt behind the jungle gym followed by the ignominy of a sneak attack. He turns to see a grin in a corolla of flying hair and a flash of bobby sock beneath a shriek. Vague bewilderment and prepubescent disgust. A slipping over his shoulder makes him turn to see the parting lips of the cootie catcher showing tick-like dots dancing in revulsion and the gaping mouth of one of his buddies laughing. His third-grade misogyny will never quite die it will haunt the stillborn romances of his future.

      Take as read.

      But this was all country folk. Before the expulsion and fall. A memory. The school in the city was a different world.

      The labyrinth of cement and fury surrounded it in a hard tender squeeze. Like a nest of stone snakes. Breathing.

      The snide flair of his peers here had a sharper cutting edge. The teachers were colder and angrier their bafflement part of a grand strategy of preemptive vendetta. Let them sink or swim promote the strong punish the weak then move on to the next relentless batch.

      It was a factory of children and they were laborers hammering and riveting raw ingots into quality-controlled machines.

      He was fed through the belts each day a well-behaved and slightly strange boy intelligent on paper but without obvious gifts. Respected more than liked. Moody and a bit withdrawn. Attentive absorbent and unassertive. Quiet in class. Few friends.

      Their hands skimmed over him plucking at the overachieving and the obstinate. Over their heads they would pause irritably shake their heads and pass on.

      They held him up for inspection like an egg to a candle then perfunctorily laid him aside.

      He’ll do well enough the impatient pre-emptive assessment.

      Survive if just barely. The vomitting into life.

      So he read in their sighing eyes in the pause between the pupil ahead and the pupil behind.

      Only his father was angry that he did not get all A’s.

      A different world yet the same merely surrounded by other battles.

      The faces on the girls were growing hard. He would find himself despite all his vows and denunciations daydreaming about one of these smooth cold faces making it break into laughter or tears at his wish. The harder and colder the face the deeper the intensity and fascination of his longing. They filled his thoughts with their held secrets their carefully reserved splendors. He dreamed of their bodies beneath the prim frock or the crisp sun dress imagining the small breasts the ripening hips the dark moist sleeves within the loins. He imagined the feel of his skin against their skin the molding of his hands around the hollows of their bodies long journeys through the forests of their hair. Their bodies were continents of wilderness and he was their discoverer exploring jungle and mountain and deep path of river and fertile estuary the long barrier islands off the coast and the wind-blown interior. He gazed into new-born universes expanding in their eyes the swarming of galaxies the birth and perishing of stars. He breathed in the dark perfumes that followed them. He listened to their voices as to an uncanny music the shifting of their clothes was an afternoon serenade. He lost himself in daydreams about their hair. He grew stupid and shiftless with desire and could not mutter hello in the halls without losing heart. The heart that hammered loud enough for everybody to hear. He couldn’t meet their eyes. His own ineptitude drove him to despair. As they sailed out of his sight signalling messages to each other and trading indecipherable laughter.

      Throughout his life he retained the scars from the searing.

      For the break was abrupt and savage. One day indifference and self-sufficient disgust the next a collapse into longing. Timidity and desperation replaced the robust self-assurances of childhood detachment. A hovering duplicitousness the brutal frankness. A regimen of self-deception the ready glance in the mirror. Arcane manipulations the off-hand turning of the knob.

      He could not keep his hand out of the viper’s nest. Where his own desires bit and poisoned.

      Oh it was thrilling the first descent into the masochism of desire. The despised gender suddenly transformed into sleek idols of beauty of lust in niches of worship.

      He was entranced by the emptiness between them.

      The solitary one idled in the nave dreaming and gazing imagining dialogs he would never have counting their charms in memory repeating to himself the ambiguous words of greeting they couldn’t always avoid. Building hope on illusion.

      He collected Playboys found in the trash hid them under his bed examined them minutely before masturbating happily on the bed cover he had no guilt thank god about that. He sacrificed his flesh regularly to the altar of the pinup. But this happened later. In fact he had discovered the wild if limited pleasure his penis could give him in early childhood while watching television a middle-aged bare-chested man bound in a chain that crossed his nipples a chain he by expanding his chest was at last able to burst. Like Zampano in La Strada though he was too young to know this at the time. Watching this so excited him he got his first hardon then fell to the floor and humped the carpet until he came finishing just in time to see the chain snap.

      He felt no shame or guilt just pure gonadal thrill. And the obscure certainty he mustn’t be seen embarrassment similar to being caught on the toilet. He was three at the time and surprized to realize later he was thought sexually precocious by some he who in decades to come would be thought so backward.

      The practice became regular. The tugging thought the sight of a man’s bare chest a woman’s bare breasts striking him as obscenely huge. Which for one who was roughly two feet tall they of course were. To say nothing of the fact that women’s conversation drove him even then to distraction with boredom. Which would continue throughout much of his life causing a cramp of ambivalence craven lust for the glories of their bodies and ache of tedium at their preoccupations. Ah. The exquisite joy of tonguing their skin of fondling their now perfectly sized breasts of lying between their legs ensheathed by their vaginas was more than made up for by the rambling torture of their talk. They would nibble him into a stupor with words. Oh. So he ran away. Then lust would make him forget his boredom and drive him back. So he thought. Not knowing yet that beneath