A Spy in the Ruins. Christopher Bernard

of light at the bottom of the architect’s lamp moves unsteadily as he draws it near. A careful deleting.

      A blade sweeps the strings of a harp.

      The invincibility of the human is terrifying. That is why she ignored it. Raised in a center of darkness the breasts of gift. Needing to give. Pulsating with the most generous of frustrations.

      There was nowhere to stand where she drowned. Flailing between knots of driftwood. The sand loosening between her fingers. She sailed like an angel into the sea. And he was left to his despair watching.

      That’s too easy despair is easy death is easy what is hard hard is reaching out holding on drawing in is life is hope is love she proclaimed all heroism the violets falling from her eyes.

      She wept in her anger. I will not give up I will not she broke down I will not not not. He stroked her hair from far away from across the sea he reached out and wiped the tears with his finger. He held her in the world of his arms. They did not settle for less than everything. They scarred each other’s hearts with diamonds. The dream of each was the storm in which the other wrecked and drowned.

      There were those who refused all sorrow their faces were fixed in a purity of mad joy. You met them in the hallways of the university they were often surrounded by admirers. The mind was its own place they shouted in the square there is no loss that is not gain the erasure of earth is the birthing of a star behind each love there is another.

      Ill wind.

      You looked at them bewildered with hope you longed to believe. Chaos is unspeakable joy they said sorrow is a chatterbox. Her tears had no place in the dictatorship of fulfillment happiness is the only imperative happiness is success success is the moment’s victor follow it. Wipe memory from your lips with the kiss’s fervor lick the body that desires you enter pleasure engulf joy go crazy with absolute clarity.

      She writhed on the dance floor like a snake of banners blotting out the past the future the latticework of obligation and care crumbled in the moment’s fire such power raised such love from the flames.

      Among the flash-fire cities the shimmer of landscapes the flicker and vanishing of empire and continent and ocean and world turned and dissolved the face of every person she had loved o pyre of essence o woodland of flames.

      Sudden palaces.

      She could not stand she could not walk she could not lie so she danced on the floor of embers secretly hoping for a quick end to all. Which cannot be given like every too-passionate desire.

      The smell of burning skin.

      They smeared their bodies with water and ash. Where there had been a body there was a vanishing. In the garden a wood dove flickered between the trees.

      Plush consoles and amber ornaments the caught fly of an extinct species clearly articulated in the polished sepia-brown oblong.

      Porcelain objects aligned with studied negligence on shallow glass shelves.

      Shafts of light supporting the ends of long afternoon hallways.

      Motes hung above the carpets.

      They were shrewd and manipulative at that time. It was the result of a cunning ancestor’s unscrupulous and patient accumulation of a jealous futurity.

      Stocks and bonds.

      It was a chained freedom but it was freedom.

      I had always assumed wealth. What a shock.

      The flattering placement of mirrors on landings at the ends of brief corridors above the mantel of the rarely used fireplace.

      Her ears were indeed translucent. Paper nautilus of light.

      The pinking shears on the formica table top. Zigzags of cloth. A hum and throttle of sewing machine. Domiciliary habits and cares the round paper lid of the glass milk bottle. Thumb and finger. A closing refrigerator door the breath of cold. That made one feel briefly warmer.

      Snow outside.

      Such happiness.

      And when the rains came we dawdled in doorways and played endless games on the scattered rugs gin and monopoly and magic tricks and marbles and jacks for the girls and quarrelled because reconciliations were so nice and ran away though there was nowhere to run our universe was infinite and bound.

      Tranquility over the waters of the Cher. Chenonceau my castle of murmurs. What a theater it is you said. What I asked. And embarrassed and happy she said our life. Oh yes that yes our life I said should we be grateful she said or ashamed.

      The long climb out of the valley of nettles and ice streams toward the village on the summer plateau.

      Pockets of schist and huge knuckles of moraine like the remains of.

      The oblique angle of anticipation.

      Although they were uncertain how their adventures would turn out and disaster was always a prospect.

      The pleasure of not quite knowing what might happen next.

      Politics.

      The possibility of imminent collapse.

      A shadow propped against a corner of the empty living room.

      Why after a certain age one ceases to feel.

      Unknown to them they had blossomed.

      The beach was littered with fallen roses.

      And the stones rose between the cedars in a gray pile of incoherent elevations and scrambled floorplans. You made your way through as though it were desire’s maze. Every corner offered an enthralling spectacle in prospect an illusory dead end. For pessimism was never entirely justified. Nor optimism though there was always hope on that island despite every setback and there were many. The roads you drove down were defined by the ditches you fell into. The tangle of mist resolved for a moment into a map a circuit board of currents carefully engineered to offer you a way out or at least the thought. Here was a door there a window we were given much scope. On the porch the rockers in the cellar a winter’s load of coal. A curtain in the draft. A statistical average of contentment between extremes of nightmare and ecstasy. Unsheathed nerves and the tenderness beneath the callous.

      It was advised to render not too much even to the heart if you would know contentment.

      A view of mountains seen before only in photographs and movies.

      It was a vastness one could not even dream. Nor remember except as a stifled exclamation.

      Cold and unbroken.

      White heights.

      The fishermen returned home at nightfall bearing presents from the sea. A shoal of blues had caught in an undercurrent past the windward islands and drove down the coast past the sparkling lines. The men with their waiting hooks. In patience the bait was a window the capture a charm. And possession a means of honorable seduction.

      They flailed in the buckets but could not escape. Not then. The panting of the gray gills the flanks the spasms of hope the cold eyes in retreat.

      Arc of terror.

      To leap from your hands into the sea. To escape anyhow anywhere and keep escaping. As though the world were a bucket the sea a crowd of hands clasping them as they flee the medium of their escape their prison. In those eyes unmistakable panic.

      We were the fishermen and the sea and the baited hook and the caught fish and the longing to escape and the hunger and the nourishment that fed us. A ubiquity of incomprehensible yet the charge was to discover. Slated in commands of chalk.

      So she fed herself on her fear.

      He sliced the fruit and raised each piece to her lips.

      What he found in the book that he had removed without help from the high shelf in the school library was a maze and tangle of highly wrought phrases that described a cast of experiences by turns agonizing and ecstatic without clear cause enigmatic to the ignorant reader.

      He