The Mercy Journals

by Claudia Casper

  I looked up. The widest point of her face was just below where her eyes were. Her brows were dark and defined.

  The last time someone looked at me, Allen Quincy, the way she did, was … never. I felt like a package being opened with an exacto knife.

  She took my hand and led me to my own bedroom. She undressed me and then undressed herself. Her eyes were filled with light. She pulled me down to my bed and helped take off my prosthesis and put her lips to my stump and kissed it. Every nuance of movement between us seemed to spark another nuance. The feeling of skin, naked skin, was like waking up from a dream.

  Next morning I woke up first. She was still in the bed beside me. It was my day off, it was Sunday, we could go to a teahouse, I could treat her to something. I was thinking maybe I could pull this off, this romance thing. I felt fine.

  Usually I would have caught up on the news, maybe doubled up on my daily calisthenics, washed the laundry and hung it out if it wasn’t raining. I would’ve spent the afternoon at the library, come home, made dinner, and gone to bed.

  Instead I doubled up on the porridge and tea and served madam in bed. She was strong, wiry, and hungry—a perfect combination of satiation and desire. A deep burn ignited in me, holding her that morning.

  We stepped out together. The wind was up, the temperature suddenly warmer, warm for winter, even now, and the sky was brown. We could taste the dust from the Great Plains Desert a thousand kilometres to the east. Fine sand piled up in small drifts. We bent over to avoid the sting on our faces, held our coats closed, and pushed forward toward a new establishment announced in the news banners. We stopped under the viaduct for relief from the dust and wind. Our clothes and hair were covered. I blew sand out of Ruby’s eyelashes and she did the same for me.

  I pointed out the putty-coloured man. She smiled and ran over to another painting of a window frame with fish swimming through it, placed one hand as though on the ledge, and turned and faced the fish so they seemed to be about to swim around her.

  I can’t believe it, I said. I’m standing here with Mary Poppins in a sidewalk chalk drawing.

  She pirouetted over to the giant, so that the large figure looked down at her with one eye and up at her with the other one.

  Who’s Mary Poppins? This is excellent down here, Quincy. This one’s like Humpty Dumpty, but he’s not sure he wants to get back up on that wall. Who’s painting them? Where do they get the paint?

  We walked back out into the driving airborne desert and continued forward. When we passed the old post office, we saw there was some kind of new indoor market happening. Plastic sheeting was tacked up over the broken windows near the ceiling, and it snapped and cracked like a rodeo whip in the wind. We went inside and wandered down the aisles, Hump and Stump and Twinkletoes, and looked at all the stalls where people sold or traded clothes, crockery, kitchen ware, home-brewed beer, baked goods, dried herbs, teas, home gadgetry, wood-working.

  Ruby started to get excited. Flowers! Scones! She pulled me over to a stall. Look at this dress! I could create a piece around this. She smelled the armpits and crinkled her face. I don’t own enough perfume to cover that. She turned it inside out looking for a label. McQueen, she whispered to herself. How much? The woman in the stall turned around and looked Ruby up and down. She was missing two teeth. A mole near the corner of her mouth had sprouted several long hairs. She touched the hem of the garment lightly, gently rubbing the fabric between her thumb and forefinger, a slight tremor revealing itself when her hand stilled.

  A movie star wore that exact same dress. One of the exotics. Was it Tilda Swinton?

  Is it washable?

  I don’t know. You can have it. A gift. The woman looked at me and winked. The only clothes I could imagine getting excited about when it came to Ruby was no clothes, but I was glad she was happy.

  Ruby’s manner, usually so direct and self-possessed, had changed. A girlish side had surfaced. It was sweet but overdone and strained—like a daughter trying too hard to charm her father, not manipulatively but because she loves him and doesn’t know how else to connect. It surprised and touched me. As we walked together she began to dash about, exclaiming over everything and returning, eyes sparkling, putting her hands on my sleeve. I began to feel like a crab with a kitten.

  I stopped walking and pretended to brush her hair out of her face, looking deep into her eyes to get past the bubbly manner. She was in there, looking out at me, uncertain, excited, on the edge of being happy. I pulled her to me and kissed her there, among the hurly burly, and she stilled for the duration of the kiss, but when it ended she ran over to a table of fresh herbs.

  At the far end of the hall a line-up had formed. I asked a woman standing with her young daughter, who was dressed in some kind of ratty ballet dress, what the line-up was for. Ice cream! I couldn’t believe it. It was like hearing Ruby’s high heels. Years had gone by without ice cream. I told Ruby, You keep exploring and I’ll buy us ice cream cones. If they have flavours, what would you like?

  She looked around her and suddenly shrank into herself. It’s too much, she said. Let’s leave. She pulled at my wrist. I scanned the room for anything that might have set her off.

  You’re sure you don’t want an ice cream cone? After all these years? The line’s moving pretty fast. We might never get another one.

  She stared straight ahead at my shirt button. I put my arm around her and we left.

  March 26 |

  She knocked on my apartment door around nine the next night, complaining about the dark stairwell. She was still wearing the blue silk dress. We went straight to the bedroom. We undressed and she pulled me down on the bed. The sight of one another was like rocket fuel. Neither of us were the sort to delay satisfaction.

  Afterward she lay in my arms, where I’d gathered her, my chin on her head. She raised her head off the pillow and sniffed.

  It stinks in here. Like fish, and not fresh fish either.

  Instant shame. You can’t smell your own smell. Should I have taken the sheets to the laundry? With Leo here, and the suddenness of this love affair, I hadn’t had time to plan out domestic details. My nose was in her hair, and all I could smell was the cedar perfume of her shampoo. I raised my head and sniffed. The odour was like tide pools after a day in the baking sun or two-day dead crab. It was clinging to the paint on the walls, circulating through the air pockets in the mattress, permeating the curtains. I got up and investigated. It wasn’t coming from the kitchen, outside, or from the apartments above or below.

  Then I remembered. I crouched down beside the bed and fished out the bowl. The goldfish’s belly was very swollen now and its eyes filmy and sunken. I strapped on my leg, pulled on my pants, my shoe, a shirt, winked at her—Let me handle this, little lady—and exited with the bowl.

  I carried it downstairs and outside. Every year, when the new buds are about to unfurl into leaves, the city drapes the trees with fine netting to protect them from burning in the sun. In the moonlight the street looked like a ghostly sculpture garden. I walked over to the base of one of the trees. The square of earth in the sidewalk was covered with dead leaves and bits of twig. The goldfish’s body, lacerated at the gills and whitened around the mouth and tail, flashed out of the bowl, like a thought that slipped someone’s mind, and nose-dived into the leaves. It should have slipped from sight and rotted under the leaves except that it seemed to meet some sort of obstacle, so the tail stuck out, creating the surreal impression that the dead fish was burrowing into a hole or trying to reach a morsel of food under the leaves.

  Even outside the smell was strong. I worried a raccoon or stray cat that had survived the crises against all odds would eat it and become sick. Surely evolution had taught everything but true scavengers to stay away from rotten fish, but instincts can be massively imperfect in their ability to protect a species. As we know.

  Allen, I said to myself, the universe must take responsibility for itself. In the narrow light of my Callebaut I saw a black beetle tent
atively approach the fish’s diving cadaver. It reached out and caressed the bright scales with its antennae and thread-like feet. And it was the caressing which was the problem, which sucked me down a funnel. That dead goldfish seemed to have become a focal point for a reawakening tenderness in me. Ruby had softened me up. A suppressed memory, thin like the beetle’s leg, tested my edges to see if I was defended or inert, to see if I was vulnerable or ready to turn with savage jaw and bite back. It was the quality of the goldfish flesh, its not-too-springy plumpness, like the turkeys my mother pressed with her forefinger to see if they were fresh, that dulled golden flesh being caressed by the ever-so-thin tip of a beetle’s leg. An image streaked across my mind of flesh, cold and blue in death, streaked by a thin line of blood dissolving in rain.

  My diaphragm plummeted, creating a vacuum that forced me to suck in air with such intensity that I barked. Several violent involuntary inhalations followed.

  I turned and made my way slowly, stiff and brittle now, no more the thirty-year-old lover, back to my apartment. Ruby was in the armchair wearing an old sweater of mine and her dancing tights. She looked at me with narrowed eyes and a grin.

  Jeez, you sure know how to make a girl feel self-conscious.

  A laugh escaped me. I washed the bowl and scrubbed the sink. Scrubbed my hands. I asked if she wanted tea or something to eat. She said she’d make tea, and I sat on the arm of the chair and watched her move around the kitchen. I walked up behind her, pressed my erection into her hip and … even the cannibal goldfish began to blush.

  Later, when we were sipping our tea, she in the armchair and me on a kitchen chair, our legs touching on the ottoman, I felt relieved enough to ask, You met my brother the other day?

  I did.

  He mentioned you asked about me. What did he tell you?

  He said you used to be different. Confident. Self-righteous. Adventurous. You were a colonel or major something. He barely recognized you now, he said.

  That goes both ways. Was he, I paused, a gentleman?

  What do you mean? Did he offer me his chair? A glass of water? Did he make a pass? He was charming, as I imagine you’d expect your brother to be. He was curious. He grilled me about us.

  Unavoidably. I’m curious too.

  He mentioned a cabin up north. A family cabin that he wants you to go to with him. He wanted me to convince you.

  I don’t know why he wants to go so much.

  He said your mother’s ashes. And he thinks he could survive up there. He said he’s not doing so well down here. Is he your older brother?

  Younger.

  He seemed like the older one. The way he sat in your chair and opened your coolbox.

  I haven’t seen him in eighteen years.

  You don’t look like brothers.

  We both have our mother’s blue eyes and our father’s big hands.

  One short, one tall, one thick, one thin, one hairy, one hairless …

  Clearly there was no way of finding out if anything happened between them without asking directly. I didn’t think that would go over well so instead I continued the list of contrasts she’d started.

  One devastatingly handsome, smart, and good, the other …

  I got up and made two sandwiches with the cheese and solar greenhouse lettuce and tomato we’d got at the market. I had a small jar of mustard and I splurged. Ruby clapped her hands she was so happy.

  I haven’t eaten this well—I can’t even remember.

  I wanted to tell you about the goldfish.

  She nodded and kept eating.

  I’m not normally a rule breaker. I fully support OneWorld. I don’t even want to go back to the old world, unlike my brother.

  She nodded vigorously, her mouth full of sandwich.

  I made the decision to keep my fish a long time ago, and then I stopped thinking about the rule. You know how things can become invisible until someone else sees them? I wouldn’t keep a cat or a dog.

  She swallowed and waited.

  I’m thinking I won’t replace them when the last one dies.

  We all need something, one thing, that’s just for us, she said, free of rules and other people. No rule would stop me from dancing.

  She left sometime after midnight. I offered to accompany her but she said she liked walking by herself. I gave her my Callebaut so she’d have to return it.

  March 27 |

  She came over every night that week. I didn’t question it. I gratefully accepted. We threw ourselves at each other, trying to get under each other’s skin through the calisthenics of desire and love. I say love. It wasn’t the love of twenty-year-olds—we’d both already had good helpings of life—nor was it the love of commitment and sacrifice yet, but I would already have given up a lot for her. Sometimes we made love with so much frustration and fear and uncertainty that we bashed ourselves against each other, and these times might have been the most lustful.

  She started staying the night, leaving with me in the morning when I went to work. I noticed something about her. She was often still, and by still I mean stiller than anyone I’d ever met. She didn’t fiddle, or tap or move her head, or rearrange any part of her posture. She found her position and committed to it. Lizard still. Or she was moving. When I cooked I’d glance at her and she’d have a leg up on the counter, leaning forward in a stretch, or she’d have her leg back and be pulling her foot toward her head, or she’d throw one arm over her shoulder and clasp it with the other hand.

  I had push-up grips on the floor, which protected my wrists, and she’d drop to them almost carelessly and float a quick thirty or forty push-ups and then float to something else.

  As a soldier who had gone through boot camp and several reboot camps, whose body was trained to take punishment and stay effective in extreme situations, watching the way Ruby inhabited her body was like watching a slightly different species. I felt like a robot or some sort of automaton next to her, except when we were making love, and then my body seemed miraculously to know the same language.

  I wanted to know more about her. How did you become a dancer? I asked. She had a way of answering that was precise but deflecting, keeping me at a distance. Her parents had been people with jobs, she said. First-generation immigrants: mother Portuguese, father Argentinian. They wanted a career for her, an education, a step up the ladder—doctor, lawyer, pharmacist. She remembered, even when she was a toddler, making up dances to the music they played—Fado, tango, gypsy, hip hop, classical—and then practicing the moves over and over. She’d asked for dance lessons, but they kept putting her off. Finally, when she was eight years old, they agreed to pay for one lesson a week, but she knew she wanted to become a great dancer and to do that she’d have to train every day. She arranged to work as a receptionist for her ballet teacher after school and on weekends in exchange for classes five days a week. She did this from age eight to thirteen, when she tore her hamstring.

  I prodded more. So how is it you became a customs officer?

  I left home at seventeen, she said. I was restless and wanted to be independent and free of rules. I got a job at a mall and couldn’t afford lessons anymore. I fell in love. Etcetera. My boyfriend’s mother had a connection at the border and the pay was much better.

  In the morning when we went our separate ways, I asked where she was going. She was never one to volunteer information. My day to lead dance class, she answered and turned down a different street, bundled up in layers of sweaters and tights.

  Why did you pick me? I asked one evening after dinner, feeling playful.

  Didn’t you pick me?

  No. I only offered myself.

  Are you fishing for compliments?

  Of course.

  A smile took over her face, starting in her eyes, which softened from the focus of eating, a focus that was singular and intense with her, and slowly spread to a grin.

  Your eyes, she said. The way they’re set in your face. You could meet me in the middle of a riot or an earthquake, and you’
d still be looking at me.

  She ran her finger over her plate to get the last bit of juice from the sausages. Your muscles. Then licked her finger. And the fact that you’re not desperately trying to survive, but you’re not defeated either. It’s true you seem a bit dead, but a girl’s not worth her salt if she doesn’t like a bit of a challenge.

  I laughed.

  The only truly sexy thing in this world, Allen Quincy, is consciousness and you, despite the partly dead bit, have that in spades.

  Any thoughts of keeping my life small and controlled went out the window. I parked my brain, double-parked my past, jacked up disbelief, and towed skepticism to the wrecking yard. Whether she had been created by a benevolent universe or by luck to save me, I didn’t care; she was in my bed and she was resurrecting me toe by toe, follicle by follicle, scar by scar.

  If I had only accepted what she offered without seeking more, we might have been all right.

  March 27 |

  Earlier this evening, I used my penknife to break the seal on the whiskey bottle and therefore had to go looking for it when I needed to sharpen my pencil. I found myself pouring another drink, though I had not intended to, knocked it back in three gulps, and now I’m over the line. My pencil may be sharp but my mind is too dull to keep my story going. There’ll be no laying an ambush tonight.

  I have a confession, besides that I’m drunk.

  I’m ashamed to admit it and have never revealed this to anyone.

  I think I am a good man.

  Still.

  We always said, We’re fighting for peace, we’re risking our lives so others can live in peace. They sell every war as a vaccination against a future one, a prophylaxis against itself—have one now so you won’t need a bigger one later. But that is why I became a soldier. I loved the camaraderie and not being behind a desk, and there was my father, but really I became a soldier because I wanted to stand up for innocent civilians against the bad guys …