A Spy in the Ruins. Christopher Bernard

He felt so happy he was almost ashamed. They whispered among themselves and tittered softly the young women. The solitary one felt no solitude rather a rustling of wings and whispers that followed him everywhere. Desire burned in his hand. The torch procession grew out of the darkness he watched it moving toward him the songs grew louder there was drunken laughter it was a wedding procession they were bearing the newly-weds to their tent somewhere at the edge of the darkness. He stood off to the side wondering when it would be his turn to join in. The waiting grew longer it stretched into years it threatened to become his life he was paralyzed watching. Act act cried the voice inside him to which he could only reply how? All action was self-canceling. Turn to her embrace her take the beloved face between your hands and kiss. Her. Oh that. Oh yes. Take the fiery iron in your hands it will scorch the skin from your hands like paper but it will also illumine. The deep shaft of being the dark well of her body. The night that lies behind her eyes. Take it enclose it as a glass does water contain it in a firm grasp and do not let it go. She will flee you but it will be mock flight. She will thrum at the bars you draw around her and fall back into your arms. But you must act says the voice or earn the punishment that is self-contempt and burn in its unforgivingness.

      So he heard at that time as he stood on the threshold looking out at the day.

      Shavings on the floor of the woodshed. The sweet poisonous smell of gasoline. And cautious the spider descends from its tangle of logarithms and surds into the resplendent darkness cautious and daring. Like a folly of mountaineers up the Nameless Tower sheer face a thousand meters up. Up into the crystal enormousness. A vault of leap into the sky. Spectacular. Toward the cauldron. That darkness nameless with radiance. Her undeniable pain. Which he could only gaze at paralyzed with pity and longing across the battlefield of the room. As she picked her way through the dead. Singing.

      The solitary one marked each spot favored by his solitude with a flower of bent iron. These marked the shrines of his happiness even when he had known love especially when he had known love. For he gathered his love to him in his solitude and relished it there far from others far from the other far even from the beloved.

      She danced and whispered in his mind’s theater its hidden balconies where transcendence transpired shadowy boxes generous stage. His eyes flickered with memories of her he used her for his own joy. He suspected this was not quite fair but he wished to be happy not good he had noted the abject cheeriness of good people the relaxed serenity of the profoundly selfish.

      His central passion was to love he cared less to be loved in return being loved was a prison and a torture being loved was to have your skin removed a layer at a time by the loving eyes being loved was to be locked inside the cage called you and not let out except in anger.

      To love was to grow a cloud of wings to be loved was to be buried alive.

      There was something wrong there he knew but what was it in his mind that baffled him from that happiness.

      He sat quietly in his room and listened to the breathing. Tantalizing to feel so vaguely guilty and serene. As if this removal were a deliberate abandonment but was not. Not deliberate it was not. Not deliberate abandonment with its accent of betrayal. Not that. No. But liberation.

      But from what the solitary one asked the vacancy. And an answer came but from where.

      From only human love.

      A dust storm rose on the horizon the birds wheeled in ragged flocks.

      There was nowhere to go that was not there.

      The sun sucked up the darkness leaving behind blindness and nakedness. To be absolutely seen yet blind they could imagine no greater. Pain.

      They moved alone across a field.

      The farther they fled the tighter they were bound.

      The grass pursued them burning. The walls of their eyes were blackened with bands of ash. It was a withing of weed and steel.

      When will come the day when it will freeze into a shining of ice and cold detached and ponderable. As massy and solid in the hand as this stone. Remote as the history of an ancient century whose suffering inspires nostalgia for a time one never knew unreal and far and strangely pleasing in its depiction of struggle and victory followed by annihilation.

      Into a cold and magnanimous page.

      As they walked through the night of their love like torches.

      The fishermen plucked their lines and there was a trammeling of fish. In the ozone above them the islands of depression had just begun to bend inwardly. Embossings of emptiness slippery with the sun.

      Over the hill on the other slopes the village straggled to the edge of the forest. Fields enameled the borders of the farms. The sound of tractors tooted through the spring. The summers were silent with growth. The tractors chuffed with melancholy satisfaction sated sheaf-heavy in the fall. Kids were crying out as they played in the evening the occasional fight graced with theatrics of reconciliation. The neighbors pretended to despise each other but didn’t poison the borrowed sugar. It was a happy time spiced with impatience for the future.

      Cans of air stood on small grocery shelves in the fluorescent aisles of supermarkets.

      We were without grief or guilt though obscurely frightened in that time of unrepentant optimism.

      The television laughed like a household god the dishwasher hummed the toys smiled from the shelves the car lay supine in the garage. There were martinis waiting in the evening. Cartoons tickled Saturday mornings. Feasts regaled the gourmet nights and music defined the shifting of moods. Homework bored the kids with grudging reassurance. Teachers nasalled bullies leered girls goaded boys pretended to ignore them and struck their bats.

      The hundred-year-old oak spread toward us its big gray boughs.

      Sirens taught us to bow our heads under the ugly student desks.

      Great clouds began invading our dreams.

      The sky was tendentious with visions of rockets pointing at us like accusing fingers.

      But we were innocent how could we deserve such a punishment. We were pursuing happiness it was a God-given right it was mandatory.

      So we learned to deny everything.

      The hedgehog disguised as a fox it was his best trick.

      To seduce serenity.

      Caretaker of breeding generator of the sunrise.

      The girl on the beach with the ocelot.

      The surfers in the tunnels of the waves.

      The acrobats of sticks and platters.

      The bright hip shakers of hoola hoops.

      The conquerors of bicycles.

      The cards spread on the table.

      The disdainful minx in the sand.

      Childhood? The lost paradise? What was that?

      There was so much more to come. I stared hungrily at a tin can called tomorrow placed up on a high shelf. There was no opener sharp enough. There was no ladder tall enough. There was no tomorrow far enough away for me not to dream about it. Oh how happy I would be how happy. So happy I sped beyond dying and what would heaven be what was the greatest happiness I could imagine. It was this to live over again and over every instant of my little life from birth to dying every moment in an eternal chain forever forever forever.

      What joy. What unspeakable joy. Life. Life.

      Between those two states of twilight a flare of darkness woven with flashing at what moment did the brightness of the night the comfortable darkness of day start? Not from this porch was the line across the sky visible it paled out on either side connecting moon and sun like scales balanced against a pale blue screen. The roof and pillars formed a frame expanding the vastness the open never quite gave rather contracted.

      Perceptual puzzle.

      As grammar by framing time expands it. As time unordered contracts and withers away aimlessly.