Читать книгу A Spy in the Ruins - Christopher Bernard - Страница 12

Couldn’t hold on the substance escaped you a scum on your hands after popping soap bubbles airy light multicolored dancing nothing left after but echoes of ridicule and rebuke the light quivered with shame all that poetry doubtlessly pretty wisdom questionably profound what’s it worth when you find yourself moneyless on the threshold of your life beaten humiliated abandoned by family lover friends but did you have any family lover friends to do the abandoning your employer sought means to replace you with something cheaper your landlord looked for legal means to evict you for someone richer you were a walking wound a mass of blisters boils in continuous abscess an emotional hemophiliac your presence on the street mortified you saw yourself in rags and filth stinking up the air a blot on the street leaving a trail of slime wherever you went carrying pestilence the eyes of suspicion examined his movements picked him up with vague curiosity put him down with quick distaste filed him in the drawer of incorrigibles smirked with satisfaction over his ineluctable failure here was little promise of anything worthwhile barely maintenance of a roof over his head food in his belly let’s glory in his shame pride ourselves on his downfall against his darkness our light shines all the more brightly against such ugliness what radiance is ours our beauty shows all the more astonishingly he is the foil that brightens us the dazzling sun that makes the moon glow in the night dazzling sun they’re mocking you pitiless angry envious behind its elegant colonial and Beaux Arts facades a city that never left the depression a reporter once said it wasn’t called the city of brotherly love for nothing how does your wisdom answer that at the moment the pain slips into you like a razor beneath your fingernails where has it gone disappearing in a scream of rage.

The abrupt change from shelter to abandonment in the nightmare filth and blur kicked from the portals of the sky sudden horror out of the green paradise smelling of jasmine and cut grass out of the weedy shade the glistening dew out of childhood heaven into the psychotic shriek stench of garbage the homeless man on the sidewalk screaming at a strip of sky between office towers. Broken in two their life a snap of green wood and asphyxiating fire. Sudden pinching and shrinking darkening and lowering as if draining a country lake into a sewer sudden collapse from the house on the hill to the tight apartment in the city the water stank of chorine lukewarm like an unwanted kiss you barely saw the sun marking time above skyscrapers. Giant tombs of human hope. Loss of promise in the labyrinth. Concrete concrete. Metal glass. Streets straight and narrow as graves. A prison three million strong stretching as long as the horizon. The nights ringing with sirens and sleepless moans of traffic a patient in pain with cries. A pustule a fist a vast cesspool stinking with the. An ineradicable scar of the humiliation of. Dark and abrupt as the head of an ax as it fell between your possibilities your impossibilities your impotence on each face reflected the image of what might be and what must and shall. Absolute brutality of the real.

Human. Reduced precipitate distilled to. The least. The subtending bond that. Skin. Gristle. Need.

Laughter stuttering in the kitchen.

Voided what promise had made perennial confusion lambent change a handful of loose coins on the dresser keys severed locks.

Tirra-lirra-la.

The sounds of girls playing hopscotch drifting up from the alley.

A view of ginkgos.

Paste of gray in the sky.

Fetid odor of whiskey mash floating from the river an alkaline phlegm of rain.

Hopelessness you fled into the silence of music forest of books white paper.

The solitary one quiet one child collapsed inside his skin he would have to learn how to lock his eyes.

There was no she there only hardness meeting sparks splay in the air flint against glass sharp meeting sharp in a paralysis of furies. Strenuous and athletic hopelessness spitting delusions of. Encounter of cacophonies self-imposed gymnasts of. Exultant in their capacity for cynicism and survival. Laughter of unjoy. Exalted demonic desperate. Crossing every promise with a vindictive defeat sucking each other into a contest of. Obloquy. Monologs carried on inexhaustibly panted gasped unending hoarse in relentless refusal to stop gripping the mind in a vise squeezing into submission the silence of the pavements black pointlessness of an infinite grid of streets. Nothing returning to them everything moving in that chaos nothing changing as the prisoners threw themselves periodically against the walls of their cell but there was no way out for there was no way in no gates windows ingress egress the wall closed over their heads like a dome someone had taken pains to lock closed the sky. Panic. Horror. Rage. Despair. Resignation. Resentment. Until no longer able to take it they once again began to wring the necks of their neighbors. In the latest glaring of hope.

Who. Why the octopus of maggots.

My folly for was I not human why deny revile or try to escape the human was shoved down your throat.

Grab what is offered.

In random possession.

Filth depravity viciousness there was nothing the child could see especially beautiful about. The homeless woman shrieking curses in the afternoon. A dampness of rot hung from the ceilings. A cat hissed in one corner a dog growled in another. Each departed for a room no longer his own. They met in mutual loathing marked by periodic fits of delusion. Of liberation. The light from the lamp on the table was slowly erased. The towers beyond the window hung rows of yellow lights oblongs of a suspect luminosity that deflected imagining. Imagine the squalor behind the pane. Imagine the curl of stained sheets the smell of urine and vomit. The eyes of stupor. Or worse the prim gentility spiteful defensiveness of a dead-end career shredded family collapsed life attended to in a narrow grave furnished from thirty years ago.

Evade.

Escape.

Run.

Into self-imposed silence.

Bits of the past behind that past arranged on a blue tablecloth embroidered in white. Fragments large and small slivers and shards the shape of Mexico or France others like little men in oversized suits others the profiles of half-forgotten women. A bird in flight or balanced on a wire singing furiously. A spider suspended in a bathroom doorway. (No cockroach nocturnal innovation among vermin yet ancient as the horseshoe crab skittering behind the sugar jar. Yet. Here.) No. The shape of the light in a shaft of dust. There. A hand sweeps a towel hanging on a clothesline out of range of your sight. The sour taste of unripe grapes an almost black blue despite the fuzz of fungus on the skins. Theft. The pleasure of. Mr. Carter’s grapes you must not steal them. Must you.

There was that small corner in the backyard where you always felt hidden though you weren’t. As though there visibility had been secrecy. A kind of safety. Or a little throne of stones. Ochre. Where on boring afternoons you could be more tolerably bored. Smearing your hands on your pants. Negligently exposing the stain of your crime.

At times the pieces are swept from the table with cavalier violence and you must build fragments from the air as if nothing had ever been.

A pattern of white flowers on slate blue.

Or rather a list of miscarryings. The melancholy woman with the long leash of dogs. Gone. The spokesman of anarchy on the indifferent corner. Now. A young girl in a tartan jumper and white socks sears the air with mockery. A grocer stares at the vacancy of your request. In a pharmacy a fat black girl full of anger and laughter. A slinking middle-aged queer with furtive and defiant eyes. The defensive Italian bellows silently at traffic. The Irish teenager eyes the sidewalks with predatory anguish. Anxieties of pigeons locked in a recursive loop they flock pointlessly in the lengthening autumn their genes summoning them to a migration they can neither pursue nor escape.

The light goes on. It could fill volumes of brick asphalt and antique glass could bulge from the libraries of tar warped window jambs creosote roofs gray raining sky. A book ducked in a puddle bloating obscenely its pages open like a whore from her inner elbow a needle slips into the gutter near her hand. Tiny cake of blood. Oil on the surface of the water. Tangled hair and cigarette butts in the sewer drain. A newspaper shouts that a politician has lied to it. A bus exhausted to a standstill vomits an irritable clot of neighbors. Viscera of unease. Tighten. Smirks at the back of good morning. A battlefield littered with undegrading mines. To say nothing of the tedium of waiting for the next eradicating discharge.

Ring the bell. Memory over winter fields. The crack of a shotgun came to you from a fissure in your sleep followed by the echo. In dream memory loomed. The castigations of the luminous. Buried in the forbidden territory of the real it blazes.

The solitary one withdrew into silence there was nowhere now to hide. Building a honeycomb of stillness around him he kept the others at bay behind a wall of stiff smiling. They treated him like a child he would behave like a child. Yet he was a child. I ask no forgiveness I give no quarter. Proud and ashamed of your conceit in your mind yours was a heroism of solitude. I hugged it to me like an honor or a scar. The rings of silence opened around him pulling in the winter birds to nest in the branches. A falling star burned through a leaf and ignited a forest into acres of fire. And I stood within it singing at the top of my lungs. The wet streets smeared with scattered trash.

For the air was jammed with signal. The heliotrope in the ghetto lot sagged in tangles of glare and amazement. Plethora. Bricks stuck to mortar and aimless encounters. A fist closing around a tube of wax. Sculls skittering down the river like huge waterskates. A centipede in the bath tub. Migrating colonies of roaches. Scrambling rats. The walls sweated vermin and sardonic ripostes. A family in that place was a form of organized insecurity.

No doubt.

In immanence a patient god lies in the paper under your feet. Speaking without sound in the slang of the city’s misery. Without pause.

Well the sortie was made. The platter shield up the basin-helm cocked over the brow. A cat’s cradle of stares linked across the subway stations. The casual swipe of the train. Entire generations never made it upstairs.

A fit of paranoia on a regular basis was only natural.

Given that the family itself was on the verge of collapse. In the swarm of darknesses vying with futility. The gymnastics of desperation as though one were not even allowed to die so told the cry rising from the street. We are not allowed so you are not allowed.

Commands from all sides countermanding commands from all sides. Of hope for example in general and in some cases particular. Which was as in other such cases of dubious account.

Lament become customary. The muzak of the neighborhoods.

You will eventually not even notice it or notice it only when it isn’t there the eerie silence of the countryside those rare times you are able to visit it dependent as you are on others’ transportation. Outside the raucous rural night that is. Where is the music of despair I hear nothing the silence is like a love song in a death camp have you ever heard a love song in a death camp haven’t they been told why are they not grieving why the macabre merriment of the birds secretive spectacle of the woods harrowing fertility of the cornfields chastened megalomania of the hill-ranges whispering death has made its peace with life and they lie together now under the crippled carrousel. How can this be embracing the trash of them. Come kiss me now so I will forget. Wrap me up. Cradle me. In the arms of. Of a morning I have forgotten.

And panic gives you the slap no you must not let yourself be taken in every belief however small touched like a pin and boom in consequence the sweet rose path down the fragrant garden to the woodpile where you were beaten into submission stripped to bare buttocks and strapped stripped to shame weeping with laughter.

From love not from love no love never love. A certain boy had a peculiar talent for stimulating unaffection even as a child he could see it in the startled look on their faces. Cagey askant. Wincing suspicious. Disconcerted. Discomfited. Disgusted. Any more? At what he asked himself. The face that met his gaze in the mirror repelled him wasn’t that enough. The haughty brows the prim shapeless mouth tilted fleshy nose blond mop. Ice blue the little pupils opaque and vague crooked eyes. Greasy paste of hair. Black heads white heads inflaming the surbase of the nostrils lower cheeks and chin. An odor of disdain emanating from him followed him he could sense it obscurely. Self-hatred absorption obsession contempt. Naked and writhing within a camouflage of sarcasm and pride. Crying out yet loathing every offered hand. Stupid and willful and preening and desperate. Gardening his despairs (thought it was despair he did not yet know the meaning of despair) like a promise.

Every she who came to visit his days had no time for the immolating ego to say nothing of the groin.

The no-self that looked so much like an all-self.

The all-self a no-self ah wisdom had he known.

As he tried to suck the world into his pit.

The beatings. Not entirely random yet not always foreseeable. The back of the brush against the naked buttocks. The slap against the face. The gagging of the mouth with soap. The bending of the waist across the knee. The only remembered meeting of skin to skin surely not the only but the only remembered ones. The slap against the side of the head. Spankings. So called as to be a regular event. Weekly. Sometimes daily during particularly demonic seasons. And deserved. They were not unearned or unjust. They cut the limit to his and his siblings’ spasms of anarchy. They formed a wall against which one could lean. The sureness of punishment almost a consolation. The ways of rage fortified thus against the evil that raised them. Would raise them. Might. Could. If only will.

From the labyrinth of woods to the rat’s maze of the. Reduced to five at that time they had come. The beautiful hysterical mother who was not his mother yet who if not her was that mysterious absence who inspired shy pity for him for the stark irreplaceable loss the sardonic insecure sister half sister the brother half brother of the perpetual smile. Yourself withdrawn nebulously defensive. And the father of ice and style punctuated with slaps. An equatorial tension reigned flanked with Mr. Frostees. Berthed in rows of rotting wharves. An alarming but vivifying stench. The house was buttressed with light shafts the apartment barred with shadow and brick. The lawn stretched clear on all sides the streets were jammed with vacancy. The only noises there were distant shouts and dog barks the asthma of a tractor weaving about a field the only silences here were between the siren’s howling and traffic’s backlash angry shouts.

Silence at the head of the table broken by irascible lectures. Elegance and a cold tolerance veiling vast despising. Sumptuous food. Riotous candor on one side of the dining room table meeting timid duplicitous silence on the other. The mother-yet-not-mother’s nerves the father’s nightly yelling at her for once again forgetting the salt. The hectoring self-pity across the table. Sitting next to the skinny grin. Your childish smirk little arch comments. An occasional relapse into giggling. The occasional irruption of unheralded fury. But usually the volcano remained silent just smoking. An atmosphere of anxious social superiority assumed by the father still to be proven for the mother who was yet not mother. We were part of the decor of reassurance. The need to dominate one’s neighbors as the only way to tolerate having any. The same to dominate the world the only way to support the inanity of family life a subadult world that kept the parents nailed to the infantilism of the kids. The false sense of power pretense of authority the childlike grandiosity of parenthood. To say nothing of the marriage cage though at that time such cages were beginning to split with increasing ease. You did not know this at the time do not know this now only guess as you pick at straws of understanding to figure what got you scribbling associations onto a tablet in an otherwise empty room between bouts of staring into space like. A bump on a log. As they used so often to characterize you from their perches at each end of the table. Often justly such was your talent for laziness daydreaming later on passiveness futility self-demoralization if that is a word it shall be a word. Over your peas.

An elegance cold and angry. Translated without a hitch from country to city. Fibrillating with nerves the feminine half.

A repletion of scorn arrogance and disdain made for a sustaining spiritual nourishment.

Almost hidden behind the mother’s nervous loving unhappiness fringed with frustration and spite. That you sensed nothing of oblivious to all but your confusions. As the quarrels increased in frequency and violence in the tight apartment.

I did not let myself be aware.

It was easy to hide behind the eyes.

And the sibling antics made for a scintillating sideshow. Oh how the laughter masked the rancor oh how the mask slipped oh how the face unhinged with rage stabbed the air with its teeth.

No more. An acane favor given for uncertain at best highly suspicious reasons. The justifications carefully nailed down airtight waterproof. No jury would convict on such slender grounds. All we need do is put you on the stand they won’t believe you you did it you could have done it you are fully capable of having done it indeed of doing it then indeed of doing it indeed of doing it now not him your honor must be kidding he’s a total wimp. Although you did and we know you did. Juridical persiflage. A modest pride in the capacity for crime. Against your past against yourself. And all the cutouts hanging on the rope that extends from your window down to a pulley in the garden. Multiple avatars of Her.

Anger became him more than kind.

To say nothing of his literary style.

The solitary one gropes for his solitude like a blind man. He cannot feel it cannot find it. What. Around him there is only bitterness and air. Nothing but eyes.

She had made the transition without ease hanging by her fingers on to the escarpment. Transition into an endlessly delayed maturity. Childhood was pushed from her with the budding of the mounds on her torso the distending of the papillae ragging of the pudendum trickling then flooding of the blood. Which from all men must be hidden they faint so easily. The thread down the inside of her knee that humiliated her one afternoon in the school hallway. Set her mother crying when she told her in the evening. It left red spots behind her on the tiles. It led up to her a bleeding leaky mess with a blatant trail behind me. I am disgusting. Hide me. The powders the perfumes the hairdoes the hankies the combs the jewelry the squeegees dresses laces clogs the pumps the stockings the garters the jumpers panties petticoats the blouses the barrettes the bustiers the flowers in the hair cute little hats the darling pendants disguises for the blood camouflage false face theater to fool them from the repellence of this flaccid ugliness smelly and bleeding that surrounds the fallopian nausea. The filthy moon of my body. Brain-dead who says he loves me knows nothing when he finds out he will run. Away. Off. Gone. After another disguise.

Women are filth men are idiots.

Help me. I can’t bear it anymore. Help me please God help me.

The edge of the escarpment bit her fingers where she hung over the bright abyss.

Greetings from the fire. There we handled with care for it was breaking at the folds this blueprint for an invasion of the past. Her fingers flickered in and out of the flames. At the other end of the city where the incinerator belched. A smoke wattled in and out of the air a weave of bark in whose chinks shone crosses of sunlight.

We were helpless so we prayed. Heroism not being an option however demanded. We had no choice but to take the boot in the face. No one else felt our mortification. That was consoling. To be human at that time was to live in a state of shame. For we destroyed everything we loved. We touched. And were instant ashes. Good King Midas of fire. Grinding the sea into a great pillar of salt. As we gazed rapt happy frozen behind. No power there had ever been to match our weakness. We drew all with us down.

Oh to melt into each other’s skins. What rapture. To vanish into the hour of our gazing. What delight. They were no more and yet they were.

The mind learned to match the world that did not match the heart. A slow learner or rather a recalcitrant student. No. But two plus two and so forth. Make three. You must grow up sometime. Never. You are going to have a hard life. Over my dead body. Ah!

Demonic attachments have their place. Frankly. Honestly. Eye to eye. Without flinching. Callous was called for it will come with time. With disappointment. When.

The desire to penetrate a woman and keep penetrating her without end in view. Forever or a close facsimile. So this is where it belongs this hitherto deeply frustrated thing. But what a payment plan! The worst crime to give yourself your pleasure on her of course. The pleasure you gave and took. Crafty she never did admit the joy of. You the accused in her holding cell. The mug in the box.

So she crushed you slowly between her loins for the privilege. Little knowing the links. Or chain. Her own dissolution taken on trust. Into fulfillment. Or ecstasy.

You the love I have come to destroy. Forever more or less.

The place where they camped on the edge of the kaldera. Curling tongs of loathing officious of no explanations. Glancing witheringly down. He was a beaten dog about the legs. Kept his eye on the cold faces. Studied his tricks. Gamboled at whistle. Made his A’s. Received his imperial approval however detached. Was only slapped by the father once in these later years. For not purchasing the gift for which he had no money.

Skeletal weeds strummed the windows. Nervous dogs of the neighborhood bayed at the passing cars.

I saw my first cockroach the egg sack sticking out behind the vestigial wings. It was a memorable day. Though disgust was followed by dismay. Rotten fruit outlined the edges of the palace. Knives piled up like a house of cards ready to crash down over my little solemn head. I saw the future a flat darkness stinking of rotting banana.

They giggled together nervously in the white kitchen.

The meals remained sumptuous long after the wind had ceased to rattle the windows. They were aware somewhere of a flaw diffracting the perspective but could only infer what no one was allowed to see.

The fingers pointing in the distance from the caravans of traffic. As if the only mirrors waved into the grotesque and the only allowance was for repellence. Their eyes smears on glass slides checked by unmatriculating lab assistants through uncalibrated microscopes. All the vivid microbial life hidden in their tears. Lachrymae rerum. Revealed by a simple stain.

Mud fell from the sky smearing its fingerprints on the windows. The city waited patiently outside like a cat burglar. The corruption had already begun. Yet you were growing soaring awkward passionate though immobile. Everything you touched brought amazing pain or joy. Ecstasy and misery were your closest companions. I didn’t know where I was.

I found my solitude unimpaired in the throngs. The city was the home of my anxiety. Everything advanced into an ambiguous hope. The world was scaled to my measure and my measure was infinite.

I gazed longingly at the clouds framed between the towers. They bellied like sails against an azure sea. The sun railed at the city.

Trapezia retreating in perspective.

No loss that was not loss of all.

And at the base of it such mad hope such uncompromising happiness.

We were never wiser than in the folly of our youth never more faithful than in its cynicism and mockery. What generosity burned in our eyes. We spread our nonexistent wings and plummeted blank and giddy. The air whistled past us obscure with hallelujah. We never learned till we were almost wiped out and what we learned then was worthless. Prudence. Circumspection. Duplicity. They were not yet our second nature. Our foolishness was our glamor our self-absorption was our gift. Our infinite self-centeredness the panels of our armor. We were breathtaking. We destroyed each other like children. We wore the mask of corruption of adults. We took as far as we dared and then collapsed. It took ten years to explode our fireworks each day sending up a regiment of stars shaking the house and banishing night yes for ten long years. As though the supply were everlasting and the applause must roll forever. We dug our hole cheerfully and jumped in shrieking with laughter. The world shook in our embrace and wouldn’t let us go. Unbelief was not available to us except as an extravagant charade. Because we were the gods.

At that time.

At whatever time was available to us.

As he walked at the edge of the crowd longing to become one of us.

He sought a place to pray in but there was nowhere there. The churches mocked the divine the surrounding city cursed it. He walked until he was exhausted in his search for a mark of the holy. There was only the humanly obscene. Nowhere reflected back the delicacy of a face.

The breath of a god murmured in the trees and passed over his head beyond him. The sky was out of reach of his hands. He stretched his mind until he thought it would snap. He sought the place where there was no one. Beyond the air. He remembered bitterly the silence of the woods the darkness of evening by the sea. In these eyes there was no paradise.

He shouted voicelessly through the streets. They responded with equal eloquence. Innamorata divina. He wept without tears or so he thought. But there was nowhere.

And still he sought. Like the child he still was. In the silence of music. The whiteness of books. The darkness of the stroke of a pen on paper. There. Sharpened to a form just beyond his sight. There brightened and fluttered a vanishing hosanna.

Oh to be thankful for the writhing labyrinth of life how could he be he who had been at one time so joyfully grateful for the gift life’s gift in this. In this.

He shook the locked casket of his past listening to the bones rattle. Inside must be the key to the secret of his loss of. He shook. Only as a last resort would he take a hammer to it. And out of it emerged a cloud of moths dusting his face with their wings.

To crawl one goes on bended knees. Lowers the forehead to the ground. Raises the voice in. Lamenting the loss of. What.

One must live one’s punishment in the burnt-out garden. At the edge of the garden are the walls at regular intervals the towers where the guards keep watch along the top of the walls is a sparkling of splintered glass and a snow of peach-colored petals. The further they advanced toward the walls the farther the walls moved. And the heavier was the scent of lilacs roses and honeysuckle it made the air drunk slowly drove them crazy. They had thought they were inside the prison. When they finally escaped the trap tripped with the sound of a shot.

A crystal garden of cement and glass. It rose all around him uncanny stalagmites. Clawing its way toward an unreachable sky. Into which the oak does not grow. One expected it for oneself however infinite and unending growth. The feeling of youth was the feeling of surge. Every wall was a test. Smoothly laughing. There shall never be no more worlds. To conquer. Even in the brick encampment of the city. In such weakness was such power. Such sense of power. Such mad and drunken glory. There was a heaven to be found in that particular insanity. So be it. For nothing else had one broken the shell. In this seed dwelled this sun. The air was dense with light. You were a bottomless lake at the heart of the mirror. And the sun as it rose cried love. And the sun as it set cried love. And the haze of stars drew the moon through the night like the sparrows the chariot of love. He could not believe it was not so. Frail brave little boat he blindly rowed. All happy. Singing softly to himself so that no one might suspect. No one know. No one envy. And no one knew no one envied no one suspected no one saw the sudden fall toward the sun beneath him.

Winter grew and the birds escaped from her hair to the abandoned forests. All hollow in the place’s heart. Pinging gently like a bell made of eggshell. She walked the woods chanting from her book. Listening to the silence’s answer. All echo. And the souls of unborn birds sang in her mind for she was their maiden and protector. Butterflies clustered on her lips. And leaves dangled like hands. In offering in benediction in plea. Of her honey drank the mist. Small animals curled against the ache of her breasts and they sucked and drank. And stared into the summer of her eyes.

Neither here nor not here. Neither there nor not there.

You woke from your dream gasping for air.

They sat in order around the table. It was in the age before the microwave. To nourish the family properly required at least one meal per day taken in togetherness. A ritual of napkins and silver. The head and foot traded solemnities for barbs. The peanut gallery tittered on the flanks. Upstaged at every opportunity. Flattered the fertility of the adults. Injunctions prohibitions ejaculations and jibes wrinkled the candles. The kids were never slow to attack. The reward was thunderstorms of laughter. Anger tested in grins and teeth set on the edge of grievance. Into the Yorkshire pudding vanish in delicious savory. Every evening was a festival. It was the high point of each day’s happiness if happiness it was. The kitchen smelled of basil rosemary thyme olive oil bay leaf garlic. Minced onions sautéing in butter. The wolves were kept beyond the firelight for an hour. The thread between the father and the mother was cautiously thrummed the note moving from rumble to trill depending on the day’s mood and pitch. It was examined surreptitiously for fraying. A sudden tension would send the tone out of earshot. The quiet that followed made the small bones in our ears tingle.

Freeze.

Entelechy or rebound to the teleology of darkness. Speckled agape like marbles. Overarching the heavens. Unless their peculiar psychology was secure and there were indeed final things. A moment that in a fit or seizure stopped time and split it like a coconut. Big rip. To draw out eternity like milk.

God to our solitary child had become a rumor what had been a transparence in field and wood the grass-lined roads bluebells tranquilly blossoming in the ditch snapdragons glaring at the honey bees the honeysuckled afternoon beneath a triumph of clouds the eye-like blue of the sky when all all showed him the outlines of a face now he was surrounded by faces each of which was a fragment of an enormous and ongoing burst an endless explosion that created in unnerving delicacy a destructive creation that formed ever new delights to feed its fathomless appetite. But the ugliness of humanity affronted him in the tangles of the city light a light saturated with darkness. The adjuration to seek god in the heart did little good for in his heart was only a narrow spiteful and self-pitying anger. That at times almost suffocated him. He hammered in tearful wrath at the closing walls of his cell. The past was a blinding happiness the future a blank blackness the present a shaft of dirty sunlight. He woke from dream to dream fearing he would never escape into day. They cased him in like a Russian doll. Winked closed clicking like an egg.

Yet at him inwardly they smiled.

There was an element of the ridiculous in all this gadding about. Floundering. Like the fish flapping about on the sand by the fisherman’s boot. Of the fishermen no longer near.

He grew despite everything. No matter how hard he clamped himself down the shackles periodically burst and he had added bulk to his biomass and a ring of experience to what he was hardly old enough to call his past. He was growing. Alarmingly. He looked emphatically backwards because back then he had been happy so he thought. No good. He kept moving forward anyway. There was nothing he could do about it. Except hold on.

The family was starting to tear light began to appear through the seams. He held his hand rigidly across his eyes. No good either. When life wants to have a nervous breakdown it has one whenever it damn well feels like it. The winds began to gather at the four corners of the map and eyeing him began to slink inwards. Poor fellow. And he had just started to date.

Annie. Geri. Karin. Caren. Siggy. Lorraine. Barbara. Paula. Leslie. Lesly. Leslee. Ann. Roberta. Nancy. Nancy. Teresa. Kathy. Judy. Meg. Claudia. Mary. Nancy. Margie. Cindy. Linda. Maria. Anne. And more but he couldn’t remember their names. The goal of the date was the kiss. The end of the date was good night. At that time. Sometimes the goal was attained. Miraculous. Interest was however difficult to sustain. Usually an hour in he was looking at the thin Swiss watch with numerous jewels his father had given him without a thought of harm in the world. Then shortly after he walked home unkissed with a sigh of disappointment and relief. Later he would learn there was more than kissing involved. I resisted the idea at the time. But it didn’t help. Later still pride and resentment turned you into something like a monk. Without faith. You learned to extinguish the first spark of tenderness and to be pitilessly polite. This was the beginning of your success with women. On the verge of the end. You smiled at the end beyond the ends of their fingers. It hid for the longest time the unbearable loneliness. From you. So solitary revenge.

(You’re getting ahead of yourself. You must first sink a fathom at a time into the labyrinth. And try not to get lost.)

What the maze saw. At the crooked ends of the turnoff. Toward a downtown pillaged by pain. Its eyes round with amazement.

The ubiquitousness of frustration and unhappiness everywhere parading as contented satisfaction with life’s unendurable awfulness the militant aggressive stupidity of this peculiar form of denial impressed him repeatedly. The dismaying insistence on cheerfulness at all costs at the very least teeth gritted in smiles. A frank weary fatigue and sadness seemed preferable certainly more appealing and easier to sit across in the ill-lit cafe. Even angry harping bitterness was better than relentless good cheer the unfurling of the vast banners of. Triumph. Over the corpse-strewn battleground.

The rat-eaten heart of the city had this merit that of an obscene yet stimulating honesty. One could not grin it out of countenance.

But it took you a long time to discover this.

In the meantime the history of his innocence left him deaf and blind to the moral lessons hanging from every corner of the prison yard he was stuck in.

He pushed his way through the filth with a sense he had been betrayed.

As you have been.

He was hanging by the neck until he was dead. It was a highly elastic noose made of crepitantly asphyxiating bungee and could afford to take its time. Quite a bounce.

Adolescence. Etc.

The greater fool.

Partook of the ingredients on jar labels and cereal boxes. The romance copy sent him out of his mind for minutes at a time.

You were always being tripped up by your knack for believing. Skepticism was a lesson that never quite held. Till it held all. Becoming for a time a personal brand. Furious-flavored fanaticism. The torch he bore to justify his misery. And infiltrate the sty happiness of everybody else. The twerp!

He was not going to not believe again. In anything.

(This came later but its roots were as those of the weed in the rended mat of grass near his sneakers. If you did not kill the last fibre of that innocent-looking yellow-headed coin of vulgar flower it would grab and twist and grasp and throttle the entire acre. Bobbing dead white heads in a week. Choking anything that is not they. Seeding unrelenting downwind.)

As it did.

Cynical with devotion.

Meanwhile he carried his solitude with him like a badge ready to flash it at certain officious and suspiciously interested females. It was a white star on his flannel jacket.

They never did get the message.

It was a form of happiness not vouchsafed to all they must keep him at the edge of their eyes but go no further. This way his solitude became peopled without collapsing into desperate loneliness for long. Desperation being the tone of the hour a foregone conclusion between futile experiments. Stabs at being. Oneself again.

And dwelled uneasily on the image in the mirror the one he followed for decades the purest contemplation from end to end of the spectrum of his life. Odd. Not that it was a pretty face but it was yours. You were stuck to the back of it and dangled like a hidden photographer under the black cloth of an antique camera shouting at the top of your lungs “Don’t move!” at the hapless model relentlessly blurring.

Funny. She remained nameless behind the whirring fan of names. Such a smile granted to few. A luxury long longed for the taste a crumb of dazzlement.

One carried it away and hoarded it and gazed at the memory for days watching it fade into a hard small crystal of promise. Perhaps today the small morning light twittered. Or tomorrow. Anything could happen. And would. And shall. Defend hope from every foe. Family. And friend.

The family swirled with false laughter around the quiet one the solitary one the child. Who missed many cues that way. Waiting far too hard.

He could only open his eyes to objects in half darkness and alone. They did not rebuff him. Yet. Or only his contemplation. The handling with its barbs would come later.

There was you see too much anger in the laughter that surrounded him. It hurt his eyes like too bright a light. The eyes winced tingling. As if from photophobia. It made him feel naked and jeered at. Ashamed of being still there.

Yet you must fight back not let your own happiness be plowed into the soil of their. For them to. Flourish.

So he inched the ice into his face. Gave nothing. Watched as their fingers slipped down the wall their eyes bewildered with frustration. Eye to eye with cold blankness. Saved the fire for the anxious core. Foolishly oh foolishly but helpless.

You had to save yourself. From them all it seemed. Or but only seemed. Which was enough.

Foolishly oh foolishly.

Not to know a better way to remove the burden he could not bear for long. Yet had to.

The monkey blinking from his shoulder in the mirror.

No way to enter adolescence. Retreating.

The memory of a clump of trees. Where you could hide. Chanting the name of a teacher.

Miss Schmeg.

Which made you think of nutmeg its sweet nutty smell.

Miss Schmeg smell of nutmeg.

He hoped her for his future. Where was she now. Nowhere but in my past. What he remembered did not exist. This was why it was remembered. It was the inflexible law. To find her again would have been intolerable.

The city thickened. What happened here did not exist what he remembered did not exist what would happen tomorrow anywhere did not exist. And nothing in between the empty points of time.

You stared from the bed at the ceiling. You stared through the branches at the sky.

In silence.

Vanishing.

Panicking

Ever?

Ever.

It wasn’t exactly practical to be the way he was. But he was stubborn. Surrounded by fences (he remembered) he had sat still at the center of the grass. Breathing the cuttings.

Beyond the fences was a chaos of traffic in the angry heat of summer.

Calculation was possible given time in some cases. Of the general shape that is. Of no individual however. I took comfort from that from the incalculability of my own trajectory across the. What. Shavings of dust. Quadrille of the infra-red. Captious swirl of enormous smoke in endless rooms of gigantic night.

It was curious how when all was said and done it looked the starry night when examined through the haze of photographs gotten many years later from the infra-red and other amazing telescopes hanging and looping above the sky it looked like well an infinitely enormous drop of muddy pond water undefined and blind and turgid and snaking and filthy and brown and irritably alive. Eating itself. Anxious. Opaque. Strangely frisky. An infinite tangle of spectacularly encoiled ouroboroi each encircling its own thousand-dimensioned universe eating then spewing out all the others. In turn. Out of turn. Simultaneously. Beyond the limits of beyond the spider-ice of light.

But he did not know that then. Could not see that then. All he saw above him were the endless phalanxes of the clouds marching marching across the blueness like Romans flashing in splendor. Or hanging over you soft as a woman’s skin. Smelling tartly of earth and sky. Or high in ice like vast dragonfly wings stretching between rings of the horizon. Or mackereled in tufts of snow-like drifts and pillows of whiteness. Or gray and shapeless and sombre pierced with folds of illusory light. The sun snagging in sheets of tearing fog.

Between these clouds which he could see and those clouds he could scarcely imagine he had closed his eyes (he remembered) and let the moscae wander.

There was much laughter in that household despite what has been said nor was it all anger. It would be a mistake to call it an unhappy home.

There was a kind of elegant giddiness in the air that put a sheen over contention. A sense of specialness of welcoming and open-minded exclusiveness an exclusiveness that paradoxically excluded no one but invited and entertained everyone and only felt a slight pity they couldn’t stay in the magic circle where gaiety and the golden future lived and traded jokes and looked out on the world as a field where pleasures might bud berries of joy drop one at a time at perfectly gauged intervals to perfectly hungry fingers. A world self-contained yet airy and light filled with elegant furnishings good books thrilling music beautiful pictures audacious and satisfying entertainments exquisite dinners wonderful stories the prospect of exciting travels an insouciant optimism a certainty of contentment a world that opened from blossom to blossom till the entire tree dazzled like a garden filling the air with the bracing scent of happiness.

A smile for the future a smile for the past. The present a flushed leap between hope and gratitude.

There was no reason it could not continue forever. When he thought about it calmly and alone. In his room stretched out on his bed. Or walking solitary and happy under the evening.

The humiliation behind the photograph’s smile.

Now.

If there ever was a then.

For there seemed to be movement. Like a python uncurling from its knot in the branches of the lamp.

A slick if slightly mangy lattice for it was shedding.

Uncurling down to your hand.

The impetus of time thus letting itself be felt against the uncalloused palm.

Seeking to wrap around the arm an affectionate or merely voracious tendril.

Around the shoulders around the rib cage and pelvis a helix linking groin through heart to head the eyes unblinking above the lined forehead the forked tongue tasting the random air.

Becoming your eyes.

(He considered this as he (as you) (as I) moved what were at one time eyes across these words just written and paused to consider the slowly darkening paper.

The scaled cord slipping across the eyes …)

Yes there was much happiness between the troubles.

The afternoon at the river along the lightly sloping banks under the wide-spaced trees the thick layers of pebbles beneath their feet cold and sharp and giggly. Moving into the water was an adventure yes slipping here and there on the river-bottom rocks fuzzed with slime there was the thought of water mocassins between the shouts echoing across the surface and the chuff of water against the bank. Everybody was laughing at everybody else. It was charged with teasing the innocently treacherous ridicule yes the generous and exhilarating sarcasm of a fathomless security. The towel flicked back and forth in little punishments of joy. Yes aggression itself was a signature of complicity the bonding of a conspiracy against the world. It gave happiness its spine. There was nothing to lose and everything to gain. Was that the secret of childhood’s happiness its sometimes desperate calm? Yes?

They crouched giggling on the long flat rock above the river daring each other off into the first plunge.

(Not yet not yet oh hold to the rock for the sun will set and the sun will set at the fall of the eyes at the edge of the hand while the waters suck you down yes ride you like a lover devour you with unforgiving desire.)

The air rushing through the car.

Brother and sister asleep beside you.

The smell of cut grass horse manure the occasional dead skunk wet earth of bark and leaves humus of the woods scented bushes whipping in through the open car windows also the smell of gasoline vinyl rust a smell of dried sweat.

The blur and rush of trees on either side of the road behind them farms and valleys streams and fields in ragged scattered sleeping herds of dairy cows and horses hen houses self-conscious and startled leaning pig sties noble nonagonal barns white-walled and field stone farmhouses all in a combination of near-view rush and farther view stately procession and farthest view near immobility at the point where hilltop became the ridge of a horizon halting the sky.

And the pale clouds reflecting the sun above them staring into endlessness like a blind and irrefutable benediction.

Sun and clouds and the brazen cars.

… and opened his eyes out of memory again and took in what he had to of the pale surround of his present.

It was fleeting furtive might have been painless had it not been for the edge of light pursuing a remorse that had no clear justification. It stabbed him periodically and at awkward moments. An inconvenient and uninformative demon. It was like a hot coal shifting in his shoe. It made him dance with feverish spastic movements and sparkling laughter from his peers.

The look in their eyes of merciless contempt and joy in their power and the white horseshoes of their grins made him wonder.

It was feeding time in the playgrounds.

His teachers stalked blind and unbending above the pint-sized mayhem indifferent and bureaucratic and booming like foghorns. They watched the bullying from the corners of their eyes with shirt-fronted satisfaction.

The only shield against mortification and despair was to sheathe the face in stone and stand in the margins of the yard unmoving and taking everything in.

The coal against the foot quietly gaining.

(6 × 7 × … what is it now … 45,301 ÷ … let’s see … (2 × forever)… plus … + 8) the whole minus infinity … and whatever happened to the primes …

Taking so long to learn the tables of shame.

Pass. Pass on. Pass out. Pass over. Pass away. Pass the course. Pass the buck. Just please God let me pass.

(He walked the halls of school murmuring blasphemies.)

Aloft.

Cast your eye where you’ve never been.

Here. Now. Nowhere.

Pencils of planes move against the clouds.

Lost in abstraction. Like the retelling.

Thinking behind the emphatic blue irresolutions of shadow.

Eyebeams from which they hang like plotting ecstatic school boys paper angels mouths alarmed with praise children in the dark whispering stories.

Spastic.

Flinching.

Resigned.

For the dead power whose fingers spin their wings.

Their fathers.

The wombs that sucked them out.

The vortices.

Up there.

Beyond this.

Not beyond this.

Surrounding and subtending it like a cord an arc of the infinite circle whose center cannot be found.

Has not been found. Yet.

Your eye.

The top starting to wobble.

The family drama skittered around the edges of historical catastrophe. Mice panicking on the imperilled vessel. Or rather sandpipers bickering in the skirts of the runoff over a few shreds of crab and worm.

When the sudden tide thrust out showing wards of kelp colonies of crustaceans hospitals of coraline monstrosity uncovered to an irrelevantly dissecting light. A bit late in the day. Kaleidoscope of seabirds. Burrowing sand crabs in a tide pool. A quiver of anxiety half hidden fingering the fletches. The fishermen looking up startled from their daydream. The smell of women on their hands. The wall of water lurching above them unscaleable bright curling down to them. A roar of ten thousand trains.

All enacted at the edges of the dining room.

Cube of light and gin and laughter.

At whose center obliqueness coded warnings. Wisecrack semaphores. Paper napkins in an origami of crushed animals. Messages tapped by silver on crystal. The reflection of a face on a butter knife. Two knuckles a bare bum on the bowl of my spoon. Ha ha. Abrupt silences. The taste of vinegar and olive oil. Of safety. Of betrayal. Of sea brine rising to the walls. The implosion within meeting the explosion without. Without passion but efficiently. The uncharitable love of Eros. Sucking the beach like a vacuum.

Standing wave about to wipe out the happy colony on the beach.

“God damn it over there I said.”

Slam.

“I thought …”

“Shit.… ”

Silence then renewed clatter of utensils.

“… just put it down and get the …”

“… wait …”

“I have been waiting for the last ten years for you to figure out the fucking …”

“… Daddy? …”

“Watch yourself go back to your room your mother and I are …”

“… but this one didn’t we …”

“That one over there not that one by the …”

“But that was …”

“Now the rice is burning.…”

“… it seemed …”

Slam.

“‘Seemed’? If you’d open your eyes and shut your mouth for once you’d see what it is. But you never have not fucking once!”

Sound of breaking glass.

Alert frightened silence.

“Forget it!”

A rustle of angry steps and cloth being torn from a hook then a door slams. Then a sound of water in a sink. Then sobbing.

Like hands drawn behind his back manipulating objects in the dark to a background music of incomprehensible bitterness.

(Yet in the ring of darkness the circle of light. At the center of the light a crystal spinning. Shimmering. Seeking the level where it can come to rest. At last. The level of its flaw.)

At that time. At this time what is known reflecting back on that. Though what is known now is still uncertain. If known. Hardly believed. Guessed. Uncertainty revealed as never more than that. Again.

Impenetrable vagueness.

No relation whatever it seemed of cause and effect. Post hoc ergo propter nothing whatsoever? No comprehensible thing. Only a flickering of images in the dark. A very strange movie.

And the slipping of the blade beneath the nails.

Tell me. Tell me. What? Again.

Not the physical bluster only.

No the undercutting that slipped unseen from afar.

That with a single well-placed desire blew the castle to kingdom come.

Wait. Are you remembering accurately? What? How can you remember what you did not understand? Do not understand. You are inventing. True. I think. Again. To reduce it to grammar seems after all unavoidably to. It did not happen grammatically. Almost nothing was spoken until it was too late. And what was said. Inenarrable. Yes. In memory all of it happened at one time. The only time.

Once.

How describe the trust he did not know could not know he had and could not believe he had lost. Had lost. Even before he lost it. What it meant. Means. Shall mean. Picking the pieces of glass from his skin. For years. Astonished at the blood. And the unending pain. That ended. Would have ended. Caused by that? That that? Doubtfully. Layers of pain. Once one is broken a deeper revealed. Down and down. In. Proceed gently here. For the subject tissue is yet living. And quivers at the knick. Tell me. Again.

The betrayal happened swiftly and lasted long. A slug that kept slugging. Years and years. How much can happen at once.

The face of the father frozen in prissy triumph.

A face he had never seen behind those eyes.

I loathe you loathe he loathes she loathes we loathe you loathe they loathe.

That face had helped make him. Had been the north star during many an uncertainty. Given guidance through perfect and imperfect storms. Given value and measure against the credulities of disgust and of love. Given an example of wisdom courage devotion virtues we laugh at now you and I. Given a mold for the sand of the future. Given an image and a target for the long-breathed arrow of adulthood.

It now spat him indifferently behind.

Dared him to live. Now. Without love.

Father. Abba.

Dropped like an inconvenience into the trash of a life.