A Shout in the Ruins

by Kevin Powers

He knew the story because he had heard it said that really there are only two kinds: one in which a hero goes on a journey, the other in which a stranger comes to town.

He slept in the dunes where the ribbon of sand seemed at its thinnest, not even a hundred yards wide, and he felt an unusual claustrophobia after nightfall when the vastness of both sea and sound were swallowed by a darkness immune to human measurement. He was glad to be out of the wind, though, and eventually the claustrophobia passed and instead with the stars and the water’s constant roar came a sense that everyone on earth was irrelevant, that if the world were emptied of people tomorrow they would not be missed at all, not by bird nor beast, or God up in heaven or the devil down in hell. It took a bit of getting used to, but he was surprised how comforting it was to feel that this was so.

Of course Nurse had seen all kinds over the years. Some lucky women place a child on their chest and it takes the latch right away, and life becomes a beautiful dream that both the child and the mother share. For others, the child is a great gift wrapped up in sadness; all they can see is the world the child has joined, how impenetrable its mysteries are and how permanent its pain. But these mothers seem to unwrap the sadness after a time, usually not longer than a month, or maybe two. And these mothers will see that the child is not afraid of the mystery, they have not yet learned that the pain is permanent, and the child will smile at the mother and she will look out on the world with a new faith, as if the child has told her that joy is not as infrequent a visitor as she thinks. And these mothers, like the first, will see the sun again, and in some deep fissure in their soul the idea takes root that their child may be the one who will unlock the world’s terrible mysteries, or bring an end to pain, or bring joy with them as a frequent guest, and that though the conditions of the world may be very much as permanent and endless as the land on which we work, even those conditions can be improved with every season if worked rightly.

people will ignore almost any aberration as long as it does not inconvenience them directly.

The boy believed that it was possible. To make sense of it. To turn it over in your mind and discover that its mechanisms have an order to them. Maybe you could place the tip of your finger on the tooth of a gear and follow it as it turned. And you could see what else might move. And maybe if you looked very carefully at all the turning gears you could get back to the first one, to the first movement, the one that set all the rest in motion. But he had begun to doubt the world really worked that way. After sifting through the ashes of Beauvais, his certainty about the usefulness of order seemed grotesque, and he wondered if mankind might be immune to it by nature. “The damnedest thing, Colonel,” the sergeant said. “What’s that?” asked Tom. “All this savagery out of nowhere.” “I don’t think that’s where it comes from.”

We are born forgetting, and our births and childhoods are soon enough dreams we can’t recall. It’s a kindness nature grants us, one of its few, because it lets us believe we are not made whole, that we’ll have some say in the matter, when in fact our ending is written long before our beginning.

He listened to her for a long time. Over and over again the woman said, “You think you’ll never love another thing in this world. And somehow it is there again. It comes from nothing and from nowhere. It comes from less than nothing. How does it happen? It is the only miracle.”