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“A Spy in the Ruins implicates its reader in the rich multiplicity of a solitary, all-encompassing soul as it lives out an entire lifetime in one shuddering moment. In vivid, almost succulent, yet powerfully controlled prose that frequently rises to exquisite poetry, Christopher Bernard holds a mirror to the artist of his generation and immerses him in the endlessness of childhood, the loneliness of adolescence, the anguish of love, the joys and torments of a mind awakening in the political ferment of the sixties and seventies. A Bildungsroman hallucinogenic in its intensity, Spy is an extraordinary literary experiment.”
— Anna Sears
A SPY
in the RUINS
A SPY
in the RUINS
CHRISTOPHER BERNARD
A CAVEAT LECTOR BOOK
REGENT PRESS
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA
Copyright © 2005 by Christopher Bernard
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction referring to certain well-known historical incidents and personages. Any other resemblances between characters, names, places, or incidents described here and any actual such, living or dead, known or imagined, are coincidental.
ISBN: 1-58790-111-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2004099086
First Edition
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Design by Roz Abraham: Regent Press
Photograph of author by Alexandra Karam
A Caveat Lector Book
Regent Press
6020 – A Adeline Street
Oakland, CA 94608
A SPY
in the RUINS
Strive to ascend into yourself, gathering everything broken and scattered from that unity that once abounded in its power. Bind together into one the ideas born within you, clarify those grown confused, draw the obscure into the light.
— Porphyry, Ad Marcell.
Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment — the moment in which you find out, once and for all, who you are.
— Jorge Luis Borges
It hit like a hammering on a door lifted the room on its edge and rattled it with an imaginary break a moment on the tip before dropping it into a long ferocious shaking like a bone in the mouth of a dog books slithering from a case the phone scattering over the rug CDs slipping from the shelves as the kitchen rang with breakage the room’s frame creaked and squealed around you torquing in the ground roll wave following wave cracking the plaster across from you as you crouched in the doorway the doorframe bends the door slowly swings away something booms far below the building had been raised on a single square of concrete you imagine the long diagonal fork of black lightning split its face yet you feel almost calm riding a wave as you used to do as a child throwing yourself into the curl of the surf crashing toward the foam of waves already spent in a chug of spume and froth and it keeps rolling the apartment building across the street sways gently like a giant cradle as you see the squares of transparency fall like large glassy snowflakes from the building’s face and you realize it is windows falling and you hear the squish and rattle of the rain of shattering glass along the street and the rolling seems to go on endlessly endlessly endlessly until as abruptly as it hit it stopped.
And silence and darkness fill the room the evening air outside suffused with pale luminescence white as the moon edged yellow-pink with sunset and the street you look down (from the window you hastened to as soon as the shock ceased and you could keep your balance) the street is shadowy with houses sagging into the darkness of the defile as far as you can see dimly east and west small grayish smudges that only with an effort you realize are people dazed walking their eyes stare up into the air perhaps the shock fell from the sky and more might come from there the smudge of smoke and fog that usually lies torpid over the city half hides the towers downtown rising blank and lightless in the twilight and only then do you hear moving across the city from all around you wave on wave of the wailing of sirens and distantly across a multitude of blurring and deepening roofs a blacker smudge turns toward the dusk like a fist of darkness slowly unclenching toward the sky the yellow red spark in its grip the only answer to the evening star which at that moment opens its red eye over the shaken city as the fires begin …
And wake and stare into the darkness around you. And wait for the shaking to begin again again the spasm and stab again the seed of the nightmare again to burn in the darkness of a sleep that will not come. But it too does not come. You wait for the burning of the city the fire that eats you the loss of love of happiness of hope the wreckage of a life at the edge of your life that you now inhabit that now inhabits you like the larva of a wasp eating you from within at the same time laying you waste under bombardment and disappearing in a haze of sirens and cries you pass the rubble through your fingers like sand and disappear in a smoke of blazing hair try to fold your body back to sleep like a knife hoping the nightmare won’t resume hoping it will hoping against hope for the abandonment to day hoping against hope against the abandonment to day. But it does not come. As on every night and breaking into fragments many of your days. Even when it does not come. As now. Hoping to find in the dreams between sleep the thread that snapped in the scissors’ teeth the palace that fell and fired in the loss of joy the city that burned to the grave of its memory the kingdom that collapsed between the battle that lost the war and the whispering of blind historians who insult its memory by trying to revive it. And you wait. In the wreckage of a life contained like a seed in the wreckage of love. Since that is what it is meant to have been all about. Wasn’t it. Was it not. Where is it. The nightmare again. Flung. Out. Far. Across a wide and opening field as of seeds or stones or birds dispersed by wind or the force of migration or a series of swift kicks. The sound of shouts driving seagulls up a beach. With a storm coming. The shadows on a summer porch. A pattern of sycamore leaves. The trash burning in a tower of stones. That. Yes. Yellow rocks. He smears his tongue with the ash. I smear my tongue with the ash. The sky opening like a palm cut with crescents where the fingernails bit into the skin. Sand in your cuff a conch in your hand. A broken pattern taking its. Revenge. An execution rose. Encrypted in panels
of sand crumbling as you read them
sifting
sifting through your fingers the words
sifting through your
through your eyes
the web of dust in the toolshed at the bottom of the
property where the solitary one
sat long ago in a back corner against the rotting
joists
staring into the shadows of the rafters
the smell of rot piercing sweet
like the gull decaying on the levee rampant
flaring into the earth
smelling