A Spy in the Ruins. Christopher Bernard

Hole surrounded by flesh. She heard. And fled. Doors slamming down the hall. You know too much. It was a long tale compressed into a few words. A catherine wheel. A stocking. A metal box. Because you didn’t. Not once. Ever.

      His emotional level was that of an underdeveloped graduate student. No one he had loved had yet died. It was bound to go on forever. Our power was infinite. We were going to show them how it was done. One of the gifts of age is that you learn to forgive the young their unforgivingness. We became at last kind to ourselves. In their eyes danced the splendor of the absolute. Success was mandatory. Grandeur vaulted on every side. The universe opened like an enormous theater and beckoned you to the tables of honor. Hosts of women gazed at us from cushions along the palace corridor. A hand gently and thoughtfully attended your advance into wandering. Although our secrets were held in a polished vanity chest locked with gold and inlaid with mother-of-pearl we consulted them only on the soft occasions when our judges were safe to ignore us. Bliss was it. The enameled park. A molted feather lay on the stoop. I put forth my hand fearfully and tenderly.

      The heavy snows were after all the first promise of spring.

      The solitary one briefly rejoiced in his hard-won aloneness and listened with affection through the decaying wall to the ghosts.

      Nothing whatever could stop us. Every conversation dissolved into music. The thrush on the locust tree in the darkening courtyard sang for you alone. Walking the streets was a triumphal procession. Joy was not as much an anticipation as an embarrassment. I was almost ashamed of my happiness.

      We were giants and wrapped the crowds in our arms. She ached to give. He was the banner of his own victory. You moved from temple to temple seeking a god adequate to your worship. The only source of a deepening sadness was the thought that you would never be adequate to your love. There were so many clouds.

      And the sun and an assault of laughter. Aimless shafts vaulted into the white dandelion air. The hunters knocked at the sky’s mother-of-pearl. The springhouse. The feel of cold water on her ankles. In the left hand was an oyster shell in the right hand fields of summer corn. Intensities of endurance and the demand for an instant heroism. Marked the intolerance of the young ones.

      So that we learned to thank.

      What before left us fitting fragments into a pattern that might suggest a symbol out of the luminous trash of the past a night road to the future.

      The solitary one smiled in the darkness of the shed. Among the branches the spiders were weaving a signature across the sky.

      Fears crossed the field in clouds of fireflies. Lambent anxieties fox fire. Immense spires. A flock spiralling across the autumn bells. Agate and rose that. That there were helices where asymptotes had been denied. Begging ever closer. Truth functions and the elegance of symbolic logic revealed to have been forms of political torture. The ascent of equality led to the even distribution of pain across any given population. If everyone is unhappy. What is daunting is the prospect of joy. Instinct for leveling and the vertigo of the spectacle. Tropism of the valley peeling away layers on layers of mountain. Intoxicating view. The point was to be reasonable beyond the tolerance of pain. Avoidance theory propounded the law of the deflection of bodies proportional to the square of their desire. The fear of sex was the fear of dissolution. We paused in astonishment. The century was just beginning to end a new one to begin. To millennial strains. How could one hold so many symmetries in one hand.

      You made a sign to keep me from staying. But it was a language I had not mastered. There was no response. Yesterday’s signs of romance seemed embarrassing today. They had made us. It was time to lay siege to the city but all we had were catapults of oak and gut and battering rams from an old millennium.

      Daydreams spinning into sunlight.

      It was a hackneyed phrase but so true so true.

      The wilderness of their bodies. He wondered if he should be ashamed. All my life I sought the woman who all my life would flee. Perhaps after several years of celibacy it was time to end. Is masturbation a form of celibacy what after all is the survival value of the opposable thumb. You turned from me appalled. No one like you should have desire you said. I will save you I will screw you I will dump you. The sequence rigidly followed. My heart committed suicide several times. It was easier than murder. Like life itself. To erase the memory of love with great slowness.

      The gods of adequacy were laughing you could hear it at the head of the stairs.

      The theory of chaos after all was not a theory of chaos.

      Words clustered according to structures of grammar over which the speaker had no ultimate control. Association was free only to a point. Which was as frustrating as it was reassuring. Or will be. The roses on the trellis near the birdbath in the forgotten corner of the garden. Night light. I played a game of stones on a sort of frame of random parallels. We bared our bleeding wrists to the moon and the long sleep of the bees.

      Evensong.

      Arrows of geese. The plangent honk and responding laughter the hug of the enormous ground.

      Windmills.

      The smell of drying oils.

      It gave you your first sensation of a life ruined by art hunt for phantoms craft of illusions obsessive assertions of rejected self the seduction the strange liminal joy.

      A life devoted to the masochism of romance.

      For thou art. Glory. And I worship thee. Power. Bless me. Again. Splendor. Show thyself. In glory. Make me. Yours. Destroy me. Again. He said. And she heard. You noted this in your yellow notebook of suspect themes for future research.

      He felt as though he were walking down the streets of a vanishing life with a bomb ticking between his thighs. A terrorist of love. You have been condemned to kill all in your vicinity in a series of virtual suicides. Though years had passed. And harm was not after all his intent. It was more like redemption. Not health the goal kept firmly in mind but transcendence.

      Precession of paradoxes in testimonials of exhausted desire. Sated with self-love they turned back to the world with enchanted eyes.

      How could one not have suspected them of predatory habits given their way of life their income their neighborhood their diet. The calcified victim found after exploratory surgery in the alimentary canal. Of course we were vegetarian that year. It was all we could do to suspend our purity for a summer. There is nothing as ludicrous as self-confidence. Our lives were pratfalls of faith. We kept stubbing against the thresholds of our perfection and raged in tears all night over our book of failures.

      We never forgave the mirror its serenity.

      For the source of our relentless feelings of guilt was our inability to rise to our own standards for longer than it took to reveal them. Then we collapsed. Yet the sun hung above us so blinding and so clear. Our hatred of life you must understand was the purest expression of our love. We had no hope and yet we were prickly with moods and tenderness. It was an askesis of being. Existence then was a murderous joy. Truth was no longer possible and yet was our only hope.

      Our hands bled from handling the stars. The larval stage of being was the rat on the threshold of maturity. Effloresence. Denial. Erasure. What was our life it was the politics of the everyday the abandonment of expectation the reality principle defeating the pleasure principle in single combat.

      Ocean.

      And love if not a hand held out to the impossible as to an abandoned child. Folded clothes locked in a winter closet. The smell of mildew and mothballs. And the child left to die on the night hillside. Faced it once then turned away. The twisting neck of the owl. Its cry like that of a woman’s shriek as she comes as she gives birth as she dies as she attacks. As the blood freezes into being.

       The night is so silent. Did I fall asleep? He’s moved. Yes, I’m sure he’s moved.

      Compline.

      The ice cross of the moon blanches the winter fields of what was once your home.

      Distant barking.

      The