Читать книгу A Spy in the Ruins - Christopher Bernard - Страница 13

What ails you? The vertigo of the streets.

Like a spiderweb that sticks to your feet.

Nowhere to fly to.

As if patiently waiting to be eaten.

There was the compress of flowers in the morning. — Will he ever be happy again. — Not impossibly.

There is the setting of jaw and the grinding of teeth. Classes to wrestle with. Classmates to spar with. Wars rising from the horizon in smears of TV gray. A decade of hatred in front of him. Had he known it was to be a decade. Or had it been only a decade.

The solitary one raises his teeth in a smile for the camera.

Hold it.

Hold on.

Hold.

Educare. To exfoliate what is coiled within. To meet the blaze of the other ignite and burn. With oh what new fire. Learning! Yes.

Euclid to Einstein add carry divide Columbus to Bird Tigger to Heffalump beneath Charlotte’s web to run Dick run to Caesar to Hitler monster saint genius Joan of Arc Gandhi Leonardo Voltaire Beetoven Edison Morse Bach Whitney Bell bacilli radium uranium plutonium pandemonium cotton gins telegrams telephones television the Wright brothers Goddard von Braun the air electric with signals wings rockets from the Straits of Magellan across the western Rockies beneath the beckoning moon and the dare of the stars by the Arno and Athens through Paris and London through the gates of ivory to Jefferson’s quill. Rapping the seance of schooling. All those noble ghosts.

In the loose fist the scattered straws.

Rain in the schoolyard. Random shouts and orange jackets. The squeals of the swings. In pendulum the squeal of time they heard with a giggle it seemed so old who could take it seriously. Everything took place behind its back.

The squeal of the chalk against the blackboard. In fact green. The chalk yellowing the fingers of the teacher. As he frowned describing the depradations of Simon de Montfort against the pays d’oc. The squeals of the girls during recess. Shrinking before the invasion. From sacking to slaughter. Stakes flaring like matches at random lighting the heretics in the naked southern fields. Their screams. Resolved to teasing at the back of the class scuffle in the corridor the boring lecture waiting for the last buzzer. Homework to come. Then television.

He wonders if there will be a quiz tomorrow. Reread the last chapter. Stare at the plate of knights in armor the shield with its cross the fish-scales of chain mail. The text floats out the window. Lies down in the wraps itself in dew. Worried by a deer nibbled by a fox dragged by an officious raccoon into. Is unreadable by morning. Pawmark. In the ink of ash of starlight.

The heretics’ fading cries.

Mr. Grabman gave it a look of deep puzzlement. But it survived. After all you looked so innocent.

Repeat lesson. The slippery ground of everything. Learned early learned late or learned not at all. Repeat lesson. Archetypal category of its own unambiguously labeled total ambiguity. Yes? As though a film of oil covered things. Slipped into the cracks between words. Denied contact. Except with itself. Where rest where there is no rest rest in the restlessness. The human animal was a porous sack of fatty tissue and dread. He thought at one point later. Only the slipperiness could be counted on he thought forgetting his own stubborn will. That shook but would not give. True it was a strange way to be unjust to your peers. But it became his way. He is rarely disappointed when underestimating them. Their motives. They will provide decades of amusement unless you’re a victim of idealism. Unfortunately if you expect. And have the tragic flaw of having a tragic sense. Beneath the dome. In the upper tier of the amphitheater. With the cries of the vendors drifting up to you. And the backs of so many heads lined up in descending crescents from you. Toward the spectacle.

As here on the first day. Minor sideshow in the greatest etc. But his own therefore noted. Peeling into his generation which he loathed as others loathe their families. But not yet. The first day of school first day in the punishment room. First the instruments are shown. And you have no idea what they are they look like ingeniously crafted toys. Look my thumbs can go in here. They let them lie around so you get used to seeing them. Hearing the shrieks. No longer noticing or only vaguely wondering. Or congratulating your friends on having escaped. Narrowly. Everyone quite cheerful otherwise. Trading sarcasms and clueless smirks. The quiet patient efficient undercut. As the cries from the neighboring rooms pierce to you. Louder it seems than last time. But you’re afraid to ask. What if they look at you and ask what screams? As they sanded the point of a more radiant shaft in the dry woody smell of shop. Shaking a head at you in pity between buffs.

Till you no longer trust your senses. And slip into the prison of their words.

Grass stains on the khakis. A kite above the swings. Thick round pencils olive and soft. Their smell. The thrill and the wall of that first day. The solitary one no longer solitary or so he thought. For a moment or perhaps longer. Till the unwelcome in the other eyes welled away to. Scum on a stagnant pond. Parrying. The quick twitch of the rapier. The touch and crumble to the floor. Ironically crass the brittle arch comments the attempts to be smart and rude. Your own timidity was no excuse your penchant for self-protective pridefulness only worsened. Silly and spiteful in your own way. The meanness a shared facility. On the first day however he saw it for the first time tacked in large black lettering on the wall. The warning. Vague and bloody-minded. There shall be war between us. Troubling the wall above the bulletin boards between photos from Life and Look and Norman Rockwell. Monsters with names and deceptively caught expressions. The delusion that this time we will not be above all you will not be fooled. The curse of the generations. As we launched grandly at our very own our unique our industriously cultivated bred and groomed our carefully dressed our meticulously coiffed our perfectly hip and extremely cool. His. Your. My. Mindlessnes. So far ahead to come. So far! As we sat at the first grade table gritting our teeth at each other. With innocent disdain.

The fisherman pulled suddenly up. Taut. Something leaping beyond the breakers furiously shaking the barb further in. Catch. The bullet ball. Rebound. The click of the rod as the fisherman ratchets the hooked fish. The plastic mange of sand. The rod nodding like a polite bird. Violent flapping in the surf. Shouts of relay between the four. Then five. Then three. Then two alone. The exhausted blue heaving in the foam the sand dragging into its gills its terrified eye’s blind in the suffocating air. Lurch up into the hand the rip of the barb out and the plummet into the bucket. Got three today. Then four. Then five. Then none. You missed. The sound of the tail slashing against the side in weakening flourishes. Gone still. Softly panting. Staring at bucket bottom and sky. As the girl skitters away with a laugh.

A moment of bliss followed by years of misery. So he discovered later. Which he was then too young to imagine. The obscenity of the trick. Unless it was none. And the old wisdom was right after all. Mean but clear sighted. Do not touch the moistness outside the ring. Through the ring. On the other side of the ring. Impanelled angels yet away. Their wings shuffling in the stalls. As they listened with bored air to the testimony. Like a therapist the nattering obsessive. Whatever the question always the same answer. In the same words. The same inflections. Talismanically. Over and over. In the vaults of his inheritance. The chromosomal chains never to free at last. Curling inward to the final link.

The damned words.

Scenario taken as read.

The lesson the quiz ignored heaven the sky within the mind hell the fire between the thighs.

But truth is both hard to find and not always immediately persuasive it needs to be hammered in with a knout. Hung at the side of the blackboard. The movable one. So that it swung as the blackboard was moved from place to place at the head of the classroom. Reminding the slow among them what their heads might need. Periodic bashing. To help the little truth sink in. Like a staple through a thick wad. Convincing the stubborn among them at last. Of what had never seemed entirely plain. But an evasive deception. Ringing changes on the sadism and paranoia that together form the basis of every society whose acquaintance he would make in decades to come its culture being the pathological construction society imposes on its members as a form of intellectual and emotional regimentation sadism both its supreme entertainment and its preferred method of instruction though usually subtilized into simple dread for example of failure therefrom social even economic ostracism and its recruits among the wreckage in the streets. So they said at the time. Not said dared not say but but would one day think in a moment of startling brightly illuminated black. As they looked on the animals gathered in the snow. At the bottom of the playground. Among the dead weeds. So many beaten dogs.

But then the place was back-training in failure the best kind first fail at small things then progress to larger and more ambitious until one has mastered the skills ensuring success will not snatch you but grappled to the ground or bayoneted to the plank or tossed the grenade will ensure its immediate neutralization. Even success in such a place brings all the shame of failure as though once again you had failed at keeping yourself secret and unknown. Unhidden the eye that pins you with all its congratulations to the wall. He was shredded with approval yet all he wanted was the acknowledgment of his teachers he had soon learned to hold his peers in contempt what you could not hide was how you despised them. Not good politics. Their malice. Their ignorance. Their laziness. Their arrogance. Their moral cowardice. Which in decades to come would blossom. Discharge. Like an infected cyst. And in which you would find yourself flecked like a splinter of glass. Revealed. Not having avoided the pitfalls listed. Any of them. Thrilling to the kazoo of defeat buzz buzz. The astonishing ludicrousness of failure.

Writhing around you in the white carton with the little handles on the hook pack not far from the hipboots of the fisherman. Slippery. Irritable. The twitch of muscle riding from a spot behind the neck to the tail rolling spasm completed in a little hopeless flick you could almost hear the tiny cries. As the fisherman picked another up and smoothed it onto his hook. “It doesn’t feel a thing” he said as you looked at the wet shiny inch of brown. Flail. At the end of the tackle. That he then heaved beyond the surf. Past the breakers. The line spinning. Then yanked stiff. Out of the writhing nest of fingers. Waiting.

Then woke from his daydream and stared down at the uncompleted calculation.

They irritated each other while they waited. Exposing scars lifting unhealed wounds. The rain had not let up since morning. It felt cozy and abandoned. Droplets trickled in crooked paths along the window to little pockets of water until a big one plunged to the sill. In a path that reminded you of forked lightning. Some played guessing which would be next. I had always wondered why the rain clung only to parts of the window little archipelagos unless there was an emulsion and the result was a silken sheen with long shallow swells and a filmy patchwork of refractions of rainbow the light beyond alive iridescently.

Your safety from others was thus in concentrating on objects their betrayals were innocent they might inflict a wound but didn’t try to reopen it. The others ignored the rain and you ignored the others. This could go on for only so long. At the first sign of sun they barreled into the landscape as into an empty and astonished room.

Confetti falling from a great height.

Everyone enjoying the parade except the sweepers of course and even they.

The world was the more intensely bright after weather oh how it shone the air drugged on smells mud grass ditch wood oil stone. You breathed deep. Yet deep. They scattered across the wet ground no one aware of any danger. Except the tedious anxiety of the adults. Their ravenous and tyrannical guilt. Waving frantically from their corners like scarecrows in a gale. Whistling. How you pitied them. Despised them. Jeered. Ran.

In the great circle of perpetual return.

Dreaming said the famous doctor who became famous by saying it is the brain’s natural state. If so how unnaturally you have lived. Jamming the mind awake with insistent questions he hadn’t actually wanted answers to there was something oddly calming in the lack as though one were hovering on a jet of air and had no need no immediate need to land. It was the others who insisted on answers serving notice when the answers were of dubious provenance or irrelevant.

He was bound legally to serve them for twelve years. To answer their questions one way or another and accept their condemnation or praise as given without appeal. To dread the fell F sneer at the common C grovel and sweat for the arrogant A. It suited him despite his pretense at chafing. He loathed what made him live. It was not an unusual state. Carping was a way toward intimacy. How often friendships being based on shared hatreds. The common burdens of loathesome mathematics and famously bad-tempered teachers. The shared smirk on the playground and the innocent look above the school desk. A collective lesson hammered ever so gently home over the decades of supreme conquering delicately tempered hypocrisy. Cemented. The awkward cunning manipulations of childhood beneath the anxieties and tantrums. The craven innocence of a hungry and cruel mind.

And the uncanniness of looking back at it.

“An answered question’s hell” he found scribbled in the margin of an old school notebook one vacant afternoon in his uncontrolled hand.

This dream then. Much later oh much. Collected in bouts of waking like rain in cisterns. A crowded street fair. Tiny eateries jammed with eaters. You motion down the way for a friend indicating a certain spot in the middle distance. You consider the time time for a chat time for a coffee time for a beer time to be going to take the walk in the countryside you have been promising yourself in hope to find there the solution to a problem that won’t leave you alone you had almost given up but someone else engages your attention it’s your father you have a miraculously pleasant talk with him as you stray by the side of the street unable to get away he is amiable and you are charming and you cannot escape and you think how soon the night will come and the problem will never be solved so be it it has been a lovely day and I have done nothing I hoped to do. And so it goes on crowded and eventful full of character and incident from end to end of its short life not quite coherent but giving the sense of a consistent if sometimes hidden narrative from beginning to end yet there is something before the beginning and there is something after the end at least that is suggested and it seems plausible doesn’t it just like life itself any life it almost adds up and is certainly very interesting and almost actually makes sense. The water in the cistern being very pure here and reflecting almost perfectly if a little dimly your face and the clouds behind it. As you bend down to drink.

At the far corner of his eye she. Vanishing when he turns. Ghost at noon. Less than memory or hope. A flicker. Binge of wishful thinking hallucination of the groin. Yet he is so sure he saw. Eyes as bright as. Lips as soft as. A mind crackling with wrath and laughter sudden in rage and in tears. A body softer than tighter than. Profile sharp as. Hands that took and gave gave. Look both blunt and pure. Spell of honesty and longing. Schöne schein. Utter illusion worth every truth in the world so he you I thought at the time. Insanely thought it could be for him for anyone so willing to be made the fool. And was if he were willing to suffer. And did. And still refused to learn the lesson repeated again and again to his stubborn and hopeful mind. As he threw himself against the ice. And again.

Who could she have been?

Something like memory reborn. In the open palm. A turning leaf. Summer not quite forgotten. Though the edges curl inward and are brown. Hand to hand. Wet with dew. In hand. The heart of it yellowing and the veins. Brittlely clear. As though he could see through them. Toward spring. Behind. And the coming snow.

You have not learned your lesson. Flunk. The shock of it. He who is used to nothing less than. Even when he doesn’t. And he hasn’t. So foolishly certain in love’s blind knowledge that he had. It. Her. Forgetting how treacherous was the calculus of affection how perverse the transforming into memory of obsession. The eel between his hands as it shook. The blank despising in her cold flat eyes.

The books. Crack them. Sink into them. Breathe them let them absorb and for the time being become you. Vanish from the scene into your paper cell. Raise the spine to her in defiance the white blind wall. The crenellated tower of words. Repeat over and over the student’s hopeless mantra. Despise yourself and collect all A’s. Amaze. Astonish. Astound. Allure. Avenge. Appal. Adore.

Nights of the lamp. Days of mockery. The expectant uneasiness of twilight. He tasted little despairs in that confusion of dusk hour of danger and magic when others are as poorly defined as oneself. And moves through them like a ghost into a ghost. Away however toward or in.

They were not impressed. His twisting into random knots of lyrical confusion his half-desperate flights of fancy shot from a gun of self-regard at heart targets dispersed on a diagrammatic field made them yawn at the futility of it. Snipped into topiaries of self. Never was the lecture of silence and sarcasm more pointless or fed to deafer ears. For longer. Giggles and sneers. He tried to give it up in the end. He tried to give it up in the beginning. His body was stubborn it would not give up its pride. It failed like the worm on its barb refusing to believe it was already dead. As good as. Thinking the heave toward the surf was its launch into flight.

The heart must always be broken. Again. No no no he kept shouting no. No. And the world echoed Yes.

The school was a larger safety zone shared by others. That leaked at its borders a keen sweet threatening scent flickering flamelessly in the air. The anxious daydream of an explosion. Fingering its way through the cries in the playground. Invading slowly eating in. It seemed safe at the time behind the scapular slate. Its mossy almost oleaginous mineral green. A scrim of ice over a face in a pond.

The school was a colony of the outer world setting up a freehold in his mind. The hall monitors watched over their charges with fatuous authority. They were being led into a world not theirs but to be theirs. They were being misfitted for the world outside. In this (you thought) particular school.

For the world outside was reflected here through a complex apparatus of distorting mirrors. What was shown was what was believed what was believed ought to be shown to minds still innocent and needing above all hope (you thought). Not what was believed what was believed was actually there there in the world outside (you thought). For that was barely endurable by adults. Indeed was not endurable by adults (you thought). Hence their need for fairy tales to feed their young. Half hoping they would believe them half hoping they might relieve one by one the misery they condoned or had learned to ignore with more or less set teeth and a defensive pretense at cynicism or simply could not fight or simply could not face. If (you thought). If they believed the tales. If they held on despite the hecatomb beyond the school fence. The cries of the animals and the people in the streets. The slaughter they would witness and the scars they would grow like flowers in gardens of promise. O the noble hopelessness in the sad eyes of the teachers!

There was after all still this strange belief in education. It was shared by almost everyone. It served to your mind two functions one to weed out the losers two to give everyone a chance to lose. Even when you won. Heady stuff! Though you considered it very strange. It was a field of carnage and blood beneath the waxen smile of the teacher. Children wandered lost and dazed toward the burning cities of the future. Their small hard faces were shaped with axes.

And yet beneath his eyes the glorious words flamed with hope ah such promise his heart blazed with his mind in sudden and binding recognition the towering amazement at being human shouted across the valley toward the uncanny shame. The uncanny shame. Oh the pride and the shame of being human.

They could not make you not believe. Not after giving you this taste. No matter how hard they tried.

And yet as he fingered the map of scars that already grew over his heart how could he in the end not not believe. Which was the veil which the veiled. Avail. Not avail.

When he was very young he ripped out of the book each page as he read it. As though it were the wrapping on a gift.

Here the livingroom there the wall closets a bank of wooden louvers shifting open to rows of stuffed parkas mittens dangling like amputated hands from the sleeves knit wool caps rows of boots yellow red blue for the girls black for the boys umbrellas and the rest of it while here the fireplace rarely used the rows of books half unread the silent stereo the shutters made of walnut and oblongs of translucent sheets of plastic between which pressed leaves and peacock plumes peered like ghosts the picture window looking onto the brown gravel path the small flourishing dogwood the tiny bluebells shaking in the spring the row of black green bush creating a quiet space just outside the window and beyond the bushes an outstretched plain of grass dotted with yearling trees the flat gaze of the neighbor’s house in the middle distance beyond that forest and valleys and the distant rolling thunder of the hills leading to the horizon where the river defined the border of a neighboring state and the horizon the edge like the lip of a great clam between the land and the sky.

The axis between home and school was created by the route of a yellow bus.

Two cocoons. Each one breaking slowly inner outer into the splendor into the misery of the. World for lack of a better name.

The phrase “giddy disgust” would not come to him for years.

The books however made him reflect. What is this place? What am I doing here? What are we doing here? What am I supposed to be doing here? What should I do next? Who should I believe? What can I hope for? What do I know? Who am I? Where am I? Is there a God? What is God like? A person? A thing? An equation? What is the world? What is the world exactly? What is this universe above and around me? What is this thing called time that flows through me and around me at every moment whirling a kaleidoscope in a carrousel spiraling around me behind me throwing a long shadow pricked with fading brightness in front of me an even longer shadow of impenetrable darkness? What will happen to me when I am dead? What will heaven be like if there is a heaven and I go there?

The answer again came back to him heaven is the place of your greatest happiness and what is your greatest happiness. Despite what you know what you do not know. To live my life moment by moment over again. Over again. And over again. Forever.

Starburst. The teachers came eagerly with the news. They spread their eyes like peacock tails both proud and vaguely fatuous and did their little dance in front of the library. They were all aflutter. Diplomas stuck from their pockets in exaggerated tubes of approval. They had their favorites embalmed and placed on biers of honor in the front hall. It was all rather embarrassing how they strutted during assembly. They fanned themselves with report cards and gossiped in the cigarette-scented lounge. They were unremittingly saccharine but never forgot their sovereign power to mortify. Mrs. Booker the hateful beauty who detested her pupils and taught them the rudiments of the German language once made Bill Peters pee in his pants in class you should have gone during lunch she said clean it up. To say nothing of the constant petty humiliations of the coaches. And the math teachers. And the science teachers. Simpering sadists. They filled the funnels with grade-point averages historical dates rules of grammar diagrammed sentences multiplication tables and the names of dead presidents then jammed them down the production line of little ears. The pupils bleated the teachers smiled. The pupils regurgitated the teachers examined the half-digested residue. Tut-tut this morsel is not correctly gagged. My my this morsel is perfectly untouched ready-made from the mill of my lectures. Unalloyed with thought and expectorated pristine. Here (they passed it around to their colleagues) isn’t this a pretty one. They marked their favorites for a fall and graded the radiant collapse. They slogged determinedly through the herds of little ones their faces in grimace of barely controlled fury and disillusionment hailing each other at hopeless intervals beacons of wrinkled despair towers of blindness foundering in the quicksands of relentless childhood. There was one he liked. There were several he liked. But most of them he detested. Yet he felt despite rather sorry for their plight their valiant stupid battle against the stupidity assailing them from all sides. Their look of shock behind their pretense of control impressed him increasingly as the years wore on. There was so little they could really do between the studied indifference of the parents the raving idiocy of television radio smarm the resentful laziness of their pupils the sanctimonious cretinism of the school board the political pusillanimities of the principal and the vicious laws of the marketplace for which they were preparing their charges like sheep for the slaughter of a corporation’s bottom line. Baying tongues of an insolent darkness. Some of them actually believed in what they were doing they lectured pleaded tried to pass along their learning their belief in knowledge the search for truth and the importance of integrity like guttering torches in a relay across generations though it was more like a match lighting three they believed in the quest for truth and the cherishing of beauty and the absolute value of absolute good like a very dead Greek indeed but they were alive alive and they carried their little faith like a weak lantern in a gale. They were ridiculous and true. And he longed to be faithful.

For he was curiously even strangely at heart in love with authority. He wanted the people who insisted on being respected to be worthy of it. He wanted his authorities to be authoritative. Indeed he considered rebels ludicrous and pitiful. Authority stood in the shadow of his father whom once in the long ago he had worshipped like an idolater whose every word he engraved in his mind examined in little corners for subtleties nuances profundities missed at first. Even his long silences were studied in detail the timing of a frown the angle of a glance the little signals conveyed by the swiftness of a gait the hieroglyph of a gesture. His teachers were pathetic copies of the great original but nevertheless bore the essential markings even in their drab mediocrity and hopeless aspiring. Dusty plaster busts. Petrified memories of splendor.

Alone he sometimes aped his father’s voice his opinions his mannerisms he looked in the mirror for hints of his father’s efficient authority the calm intensity of his gaze. In despair. For there was little resemblance he could see till his mother who was not his mother but then who was his mother gone she once pointed out the little fold over the eye she claimed he shared with his father and indeed all the family on his side it comes from the Indian blood that came into the family many generations ago. He became terribly proud of that little fold of his Indianness of his fatherness. It gave his face an exotic cast that almost feminine face with its pudgy cheeks pale eyebrows cropped blond hair. What frightened him was the irritation he would suddenly see in his father’s face when in order to please him he tried a brief imitation. The face froze in what it would take him many years to realize was recognition. Where did he get that phrase that expression on his face that way of turning his back on the room. What does he think he is doing. Throwing my weaknesses in my face as though they were flatteries. The little monkey pantomiming the king. In exasperatingly faithful idolatry. That would one day be so deeply betrayed.

For the father feared and loved and hated what he saw in the mirror that was his son.

And his son in baffled longing absorbed his father’s fear and love and hatred and made it into the bone of what he was.

Neither could turn away from the other. For neither knew more than what he saw. And that was all reflection. Hypnotic in adoration and repulsion.

Till escape expunged the necessary little war.

But that was still to come. Now he studied bent over his books. Like his father spent many an evening or weekend afternoon bent over a book his teachers told him to study he pleased the adults by studying. Even his peers grudgingly respected the swat. Evenings were hecatombs of paper and pencils. His natural laziness was flattered by the ease with which he conquered his homework and excited his teachers with the cunning nonsense of his compositions in English and his date-perfect responses in history.

Arithmetic was more lugubrious and science a meticulous bore until one Christmas you were given a chemistry set with microscope and proceeded to kill ants for examination and blow up test tubes of intricately frothing cocktails.

Exploration and experiment these were your watchwords talismans for happiness in your hermit-like room.

Interrupted by dinner the elaborate feasts jest-fests off-the-cuff lectures quick-hand attacks of hard little truth delivered with a grin and obliquely adult chronicles of the public relations firm where your father worked and the more mysterious affairs of the household when the house breathed a kind of nocturnal existence in daylight when you were at school. Then the troop to the TV den while you increasingly kept to the chemical studious and musical haunt of your room.

For you were left alone to explore the new contents of your discoveries. To get lost as you did alone a little frightened and deeply attentive.

You turned inward like a screw and kept your joys perversely to yourself.

Not as if you had not tried to share the little flecks of opal and sapphire you found among the books and recordings of your father’s choice library. But like as not their value was an acquired taste and those around you seemed to prefer more usual stuff. The insipidities of television. The brutality of sports. The radio’s static crooning.

Though your parents pretended otherwise.

This was bewildering. Reality was scorned as pretense the pretense respected as reality (so he thought). It was enough to make one go mad or philosophical.

He went both.

Wrapped in silence. Furtive withdrawn watchful intense inept serious and sincere at the wrong moments sarcastically comic at impossible ones.

He made them uneasy himself above all.

Every other week he shed a skin and grew a new interest. Your eyes are bigger than your stomache mother who was not his mother told him whenever he was unable to finish his third helping.

It was as though he wanted to eat the world from different positions at the dinner table.

He was fascinated by the word understanding.

He had perfect faith it could be acquired.

It was only a question of accumulation and openness. And time that treasure chest of fire.

Adulthood would be an era of ever-deepening understanding.

To understand was to stand. At the edge of the sea on the crest of the mountain and survey earth ocean clouds and sky in a single sweep of the mind.

It was stronger than power it was deeper than knowledge it was even deeper than love.

He stood on the little hill in the piles and serenely overlooked the halted excavations and the gray hard fields the lure of the woods the little boxes of houses plunked down by the country road and the hills rolling away behind thickening screens of dimness in the far distance to the east.

It would grow only richer forever.

He was sure of that at least of that.

How it thrilled him.

That certainty.

The legacy that awaited him.

It came as something of a surprise to learn that the will was written in invisible ink. So much trickier the task of deciphering a text on a blank and tumultuous page.

The darkening halls.

At the far ends splashes of linoleum light.

Noisy crowds of shadows through which you pitch and scuttle.

Small acid comments.

The relentless cynicism of children. In the trap.

Yellow stains of light on the ceiling.

Silent teachers wading through the crowd clasping papers to their chests and looking absent.

Little notes of cheer and increasing laughter as the day wore on toward last class.

Classrooms like dusty jewelry cases with the students lined up in their disingenuous settings glinting dully toward the teacher.

The utterly secure orderliness and boredom of it fractured by the occasional menace of a test.

At the end of each year the automatic notch into the next grade.

Twelve in all divided into three.

With the thrill of college waving you on from the other side.

Then the triumph of adulthood the victorious career the woman you love the children you will teach your wisdom to all the gains you have made in your ever-deepening understanding the magnificent house the mobs of friends the enviable reputation and travels to the most exotic lands a progress of triumphs the sheer excitement of the world in your hands the world welcoming you like a lover like a potentate like a conqueror it would all come as naturally as breathing.

You remember a time in early childhood you snatch eggs from under a gaggle of chickens and place them in your basket braving the defiant squawks and indignant pecking and then waddle back to the kitchen under the white load heavy and fragile feeling very proud of yourself the smiles and cheers on every side as you raise the basket in the brilliant kitchen and walk up to the table now one more step and totter to the oh look at him edge grinning yourself now totter up to the edge again oh look of the tabletop in the totter to the smiling with one more time totter up to the victory look at him then

oh no down they go!

(and all that scalding laughter!)

But this sums nothing up.

Katy’s hot pink nipples in the white of her skin bathed in the light through her blouse her fingers holding the neck of it open she laughs giddily into your ear your vague feeling of disappointment for they looked so like your own only pinker there was nothing particularly special about them why was everyone including you so excited about seeing them? The boys had gathered at the edge of the woods at the edge of the playground whispering among themselves “Katy’s going to show her titties.” It seemed very exciting at first many of them never having seen a girl’s naked chest before. You had seen your sister’s naked dumpling torso with its little nipples and smooth cloven groin and thought nothing much of it also your mother who was not your mother which seemed more formidable and troubling pasty lunar globes massive florid aureoles and a wilderness of black between her thighs also your great aunt once great wrinkled sagging dugs and brush of graying fur between her legs disgusting and vaguely terrifying her breasts were bigger than your head. Nudity was neither flaunted nor hidden in your household it happened without coyness between bedroom and bath you often shared a pee with your father in the john glancing timidly at the monstrous shaggy penis next to your shoulder and jiggling your own petite hairless willy in mock imitation. So why the silly excitement over Katy yet it was so. The anticipation as always everything a setup for disappointment it would not be the last time you were disappointed in a woman. When the boys giggled knowingly about something they called screwing you were not taken in it was too preposterous. You could not imagine your father and mother who was not your mother in such a silly position. Although you had been masturbating since early childhood you couldn’t imagine doing it in any sense with a partner. You would be too embarrassed. For the rest of your life. As it turned out. You always to be happier or if not that more content alone than with any other human being. Lecturing the ceiling. Whispering stories to the pillow. Daubing the air with fairy tales. Delivering angry and eloquent speeches to the hushed and silent walls. A helix twisiting madly in a pure crystal cube. Turning your room into a universe. You both darkness and sun and the terrifying embrace of the stars. Oh that vast gale. As you nursed your body and mind with ever-faithful tenderness. Your own lover. Loyal beast in the palace. Pacing the 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 the boredom and desire was the scald of the first betrayal the one that would not heal. But this comes later we are anticipating. We are always anticipating the disaster that must come. Yet never actually arrives.

For what excited him in his boyhood was boys. It would be always the masculine that gave him the supreme thrill though the gonads shifted their interest. He identified with the boy the boy was both invader and invaded in his fantasies where he was roped to a stake at the far end of the bathroom facing a firing squad his little chest bared to the guns heaved out in defiance the muskets would shoot or the arrows fly he was a fan of Robin Hood and the Swamp Fox freelance hero of the revolution and he would collapse writhing in agony to the floor imagining the blank astonished faces of his heroes gazing down at him or away in a distant stare as he excitedly humped the bathroom mat. After taking his bath for the hot water relaxed and aroused him. In the far children’s wing of the house where he was alone with his solitary ecstasy the rest of the family upstairs watching TV. He was caught only once and warned but it was too late he was far too accustomed to his play. So much so he was deeply shocked to learn later that sex was something two people could do together. Which he never became entirely used to a partner always seeming an unnecessary intrusion into the fantasy.

In the meantime. His first infatuation was for a reckless halfdelinquent who led the pack in the fifth grade a year ahead of him. Pale skin wild-eyed dark shutter of bang over his forehead a crazy happy look on his face a mischievous glitter following him a curiously feminine face retailing boy-man outrages he shouted through the playground raced leading his pack down the field had a bullying streak was often in trouble then shrugged it off and with an aimless laugh ran back into the air. He never knew his last name only Bobby. He spent most of recess in search of Bobby generally fruitless. For Bobby was a furtive brat only appearing then vanishing into the wilderness of the solitary one’s imagination. Any solitary one’s imagination. For he was an image of bravado only and at the end of a single year disappeared.

Except in the solitary executions beside Robin and Fox of the bathroom.

The cold sleek ravishing face with the withdrawn luminous eyes blurs after a dim pause into a cold and gorgeous girl with the ambiguous name of Geri. She sits behind you in the next row in English and history smiling vaguely and ignoring you as she ignores everyone except the fat ugly girl her best friend who serves her as a perfect foil. Her face is smiling or expressionless she never laughs nor scowls. This gives her an aura of almost frightening power. Perfectly dressed at all times. You suspect make-up but cannot prove it. You corkscrew in your chair at every opportunity trying to catch her eye when the teacher throws out a question. You show off your little bookish learning. Triumphantly tickle the class into laughter. Make smart remarks that prove your ignorance like a theorem. And in an entire year catch her eye perhaps twice. It must have been more often than that. It is laughing each time it skims over you. In barely acknowledged contempt.

In no other eyes but your own do you exist was the lesson begun now and to be repeated ad nauseam until you mastered it. Of the nightmare that was beginning called love. It was serenely cold and even rather kind. At first. A gentle quizzing foreshadowing more brutal rites. No knowing of course that the student would prove so slow. So dense. So deservingly failed.

The agonies of those years unbearable yet bearable and unfatal and silly. A form of torture without the dignity of killing you merely spitting you out into the world a spastic wreck shamed inadequate despised by the one inescapable authority yourself put through the paces of the genes stumbling rebelliously obedient despite yourself as you performed each night to the bored crowd in the sideshow hoosegow of

Where you were convict prison guard clown

In the absurd torture chamber you

In the prison of circling shadows you

Became

Were

Must be

Wobbling like a calf in your head a ridiculous grandeur.

No.

No. Too soon to tell.

Somewhere back there the fork and the turning.

The building up then the tearing down.

Somewhere in the principle of the building up the principle of the tearing down.

The lump of gold of the melted crown mixed according to plan in the rubble.

The ranks in to assembly a scum bouquet those tousled heads a rhubarb murmur clouds of arms mobs of legs row on row aimless spitballs targeted whistles insults weak as jokes but inadvertently crippling the simmer of hormones in ranks of laps thrumming knees in nervous leery paradiddles little male titters at the flumed bouffants of that never-so-innocent era monitors stalking the side aisles heads bobbing like marionettes elbows in the ribs dominoing down half a row the ever-lookout for objects of scorn what one learns about the psychology of a crowd one need look no further than an assembly of teenagers lashed into nervous order by the gazes of their defied and obeyed teachers.

He sits cold and alone at the end of his row pretending to look over his notes not one of them never to be one of them proud scornful despising them in despair.

How do they do it how do they live so easily in the heavy light how can they breathe what makes them so calm and cheerful as they butcher each other with blows of breath in preparation for the bloodbath of adulthood?

Yet he too is at ease even cheerful in his scorn as he calmly condemns them from his niche high in the shadow of the nave. Knowing no better. Sometimes even suspecting he knows no better.

But not here. Not yet. Not now.

As the rhubarb climaxes to the sound of the bell.

As the ridiculous prinicipal the principle of the ridiculous calls the principle of anarchy to order.

Beyond the confines of the days’ routines the scheduling of classes the ranking of curriculum examination promotion the grid of grades and the false measure the click and shove of hour and term the petty rebellions and petty punishments the little triumphs and little defeats the looking forward to Christmas vacation in the fall the looking forward to summer vacation in the spring the hope for snow and the disillusion of Monday mornings the gradual light and darkness of a world beyond the terrors and boredom of this little bootcamp for the mind they gathered in a crowd against the classroom window it lolled its tongue at you like an idiot.

It was all fantasy what you dreamed beyond the schoolyard fence. You built little towers without compensation piling sand on sand of exuberant hope romantic disaster. Yes! A catastrophe would be exciting. So you taught yourself a loathing of security. You despised safety though careful not to actually endanger your own. For the most part. How eloquently you soared heroic and unwary when completely alone in your room or at the edge of a field hidden in the shade. How nervous withdrawing stuttering in the presence of any other person at all. The distance between the mask and the face grew daily. Sailed toward opposite horizons between them a baffled sea and a radiant sun. But which is the mask which is the face? Am I what I think I am or what others think I am? And which others? Or am I neither but something else entirely? Then what am I? A confused and morbid preadolescent came the most convincing and unbearable answer. From which you ran. Toward your dream of the world.

Which one day broke you. And scattered you like salt over the cuts on your hands.

But not yet. Let’s stay a while longer cooped in the boring safety of school intrigues and routines. The games of dominance and submission the exercises in triumph and failure the comparisons the trade-offs the contests the betrayals the pricking sarcasms the pen-knife victories that would seem meaningless in the years to come. But I am anticipating as always an author’s prerogative. Because after all I survived or I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this for you. Am I sitting here writing this for you. Something wrong there but I can’t think what. Anyway I didn’t sink like a stone as he did. Almost did. Did I? Am I? In fact my hand extended toward him and my eyes watched him as he sank. Amazed and horrified and pleading and contemptuous. Loving and hating. Before coldly turning back toward safety. The little victory to come time and leisure and just enough money and a talent for indolence and ordering memories into dazzling little patterns to please the slightly inflated ego. Surviving as I said.

Didn’t I?