The Mercy Journals

by Claudia Casper

  Maybe I was a good man, who knows. In any case, once again I am a man who can no longer live with himself.

  Now my pencil is dull too. I’m going to sleep.

  March 28 |

  It was around that time I started having one of those repeating dreams, and one morning before we got out of bed, I told her about it.

  I locked you up in a gingerbread house in a cage beside the oven and I was fattening you up. I was feeding you roast chicken and gravy and beef—feasts from the old days—tandoori, teriyaki, cookies, puddings, trifles, and cakes. I kept them coming, feeding you through an opening in your cage. All the time I had the key to your cage, a chicken bone on a strip of rawhide, around my neck.

  I didn’t tell her that in the dream she was naked and scared and cringed in the corner of the cage except when I brought her food.

  You ate like a wild animal, stuffing your face until the food was gone, but you never put on any weight and I worried I might never be able to eat you.

  She laughed. It wasn’t a full laugh—it was short, a sound of surprise and pleasure in the surprise.

  That’s quite a flattering picture you paint of yourself, she said, a wicked witch in a gingerbread house. She stretched out under the covers, put her arm across my chest, and whispered, I better be careful tonight when I’m eating so you don’t discover where I’m putting it all. I want to keep you working hard in that kitchen.

  I went to work that day feeling happy, though I see now, also with an undertone of anxiety. I had never thought I’d feel happy in that way again. Connected to someone. The rain had stopped and it was silent outside except for a light gurgling of water in drainpipes. I took the longer route by the bay where the loading docks used to be, wanting to stretch out my walk. The huge red loading cranes stood in water up to their knees, like a phalanx of long-necked robot Apatasauri, lifting their heads as though at a sound and looking into the distance.

  A skateboarder tattooed at speed toward me and I had to spin away to avoid getting knocked over. The kid hurtled past, hair sticking out from his grey wool toque, toting a backpack big enough to hold all he owned. He might have been fifteen or sixteen, my youngest son’s age when he and his brother left.

  Because I was happy and letting my guard down, I let myself think, just for a flash, about Jennifer and Luke and Sam. All the love was there, like an ocean stretching forever, deep blue, sparkling and fierce. I glanced out over the expanse, but even that instant of opening brought with it a howling clamour, a gnashing and tearing. I broke into a sweat and fled toward work.

  Velma said I looked like I’d seen my own ghost and uncharacteristically shared some hot tea from her thermos.

  A few days later Ruby kicked my door rather than knocking on it. She stood in the hallway, hands cupped in front, holding salmonberries. First of the season. A bit sour, but still. She let them fall onto the kitchen counter then fed us, one for her, one for me.

  We were getting exhausted from lack of sleep and the intensity of the preceding nights so we decided to snack on leftovers in bed and read. Ruby had to make sure there were enough leftovers before she agreed to forgo dinner.

  Her mobile was always undercharged because she barely ever went home, so we scanned the news together on mine. Headline: The Council of Armed Conflict Arrests over a Thousand on Three Continents. The rebels, organized in a network of cells, are planning to gain control of resource-rich regions in isolated areas. They have succeeded in building up weapons caches—though how many is still unknown. They have gone undetected by using an agricultural language code over long-range, solar-charged two-way radios. Anyone noticing suspicious behaviour consistent with such activities is asked to report it immediately. The Council reiterates that the global environment is still too volatile to allow for any deregulated activities, and that this subversive network’s success could imperil everyone.

  I handed the mobile to Ruby with the comment, It’s surprising how little time it takes for some people to get over their fear of extinction. I opened a book.

  She scanned for a while then lay back and looked up at the ceiling. In school, she eventually said, I remember learning that the motion of the tiniest particle of matter can change just from the force of being looked at. Quincy, what do you suppose happens when all the particles that go into making a human being collide into each other the way we have?

  March 29 |

  Ruby told me not to expect her for a few days. She kept it vague. Something for her work.

  The first night alone, I came home from work and changed into my slippers and army sweater. I made tea and got my mobile ready on the side table. After so much sex, I expected to feel relaxed and pleasantly tired. I was looking forward to reading the news at length and at my own pace.

  They have a hard time keeping the news upbeat these days. Their desperation can be funny, for example today’s banner, Lost Girl Found With Mystery Animal, showed a wet, dirty eight-year-old with a fluffy tan creature perched on her shoulder, clearly a stuffed gopher. This was followed by East Coast Shelters Overwhelmed Again, and Global Temperature Rise Only 0.1 Celsius in 6 Months. I scrolled down: New Strain of Dysentery Kills 100,000 in Central Africa; Food Production, Water Use, and Population to Balance by 2057 with One-Child Law.

  I read for a while, sipping my tea, but then I looked up, and everything in my apartment irritated me. The walls were stained and the drywall chipped, the join between the floor and the baseboards was uneven, and the finish in the corners lumpy. I heard the kid upstairs running up and down the hall and rain pinging loudly on metal where the drainpipe was broken. Someone brushed their hands over my door as they felt their way up the creaking stairs to their apartment.

  My apartment felt thin and cheap and badly built. I no longer felt hidden and pleasantly dormant in my home. Everywhere I looked I saw Ruby out of the corner of my eye. I began pacing inside my head, back and forth, back and forth. What was she doing to me? I’d been coping. I had my pleasures. I did my work. I was off the booze. I had my mind tamped down.

  Now she was getting on with her life—visiting an old friend, staging a new choreography, sleeping god knows where—she hadn’t specified when she’d be back, and I was beginning to come undone.

  I hadn’t understood what was happening to me. I’d thought, if I thought at all, that she was bringing me back to life but I hadn’t thought what coming back to life would really mean. For the three nights she wasn’t there, Ruby was like a mirror, angled to reflect the longest, darkest corridors inside me. This was when I thought—I am going to pay for this.

  No woman wants a man who can’t live without her. I was determined to conceal that I found her absence unbearable.

  The third night the empty echo started to recede. I bought myself sausage and spud for dinner to cook with some old cabbage and dried herbs. I’d gone off my fitness routine earlier because of a tweak in my back, but I started again with renewed vanity. I came home, changed into gym strip, and did three sets of push-ups, crunches, doorway chin-ups, and weight-reps followed by joint mobilizations. I showered, then cooked up the sausages, sliced them into discs, and mixed them with the boiled potatoes, cabbage, some oil, and the herbs. I fed my remaining goldfish with no less affection, despite their intra-pisco sadism, and cracked open the book I’d been rereading before she showed up, the biography of Bertolt Brecht, six or seven years overdue at the library. I propped the book up against the wall, wedged it in place with a rock I use for the purpose, and started to fork in my dinner as the fish twinkled in their tank, snatching at swirling flakes of food. I savoured the bursts of salty sausage with the bland potatoes and slightly crunchy cabbage. I was near the end of the book, after Brecht had died, and the author explained how Brecht wanted to be buried in a steel coffin because he had a horror of being eaten by worms.

  An expensive, bulletproof coffin seemed out of character for the playwright, a committed Marxist, he of the philosophy, All that is solid melts into air. Why insist on spending a small fortu
ne to deprive worms of a meal that would have been no skin off his back, so to speak? Hadn’t anyone told him that the worms would be going into the coffin with him, already latent in the bubbly soup of his bowels? He had specified too that he wanted to be buried with a stiletto in his heart. I was sorting out that a stiletto probably meant a knife and not the spike heel of a woman’s shoe and pondering how such a thing could be “placed” in someone’s heart, when a rap followed by a shuffle in front of my apartment door caused my heart to leap like a schoolgirl’s.

  I tossed my fork onto my plate, pushed back my chair, and rushed to open the door. Her hair was plastered to her skull, her face was flushed, and she wore a strange new garment made of gray rags stitched to some kind of flesh-coloured bodice with the red shoes and her customs-uniform jacket. She stepped into the apartment and looked around. Where before she had been in charge, spectacularly so, now she seemed timid, apprehensive, hunted. The apartment was warmer than usual with the heat from the cooker and the body heat from my exercises. She took off her coat and held it folded over her hands. I took it from her and put it on the hook over mine. She was covered in sweat and her lean muscles bulged.

  Are you all right? I asked.

  She turned and looked at me, recharging before my eyes. She put her hand against my chest and backed me up against the closed front door, took my shoulders, turned us around so she was against the door, and wrapped one leg around my hips. The rest of this “pirouette” will stay locked in the memory bank.

  After her spirited rally, Ruby slumped again. I gave her a plate of leftovers and she received it like a beggar getting a handout. She ate warily, looking up frequently—at the goldfish, at me, at the cover of my book. I got up and placed a glass in front of her. I got a bottle of whiskey, bought specially for her, out from under the sink and broke the seal.

  Thank you.

  You’re welcome.

  I carried her plate to the sink. You changed your dress.

  You’re not joining me? she asked, raising her glass.

  Can’t.

  I reached over and caressed her cheek with the back of my hand. She leaned into the caress, then took a deep breath and sat back.

  Why not?

  I sat down across from her.

  I am not being evasive, but I’m so very tired of myself. I’ll tell you sometime, if you’re still curious, but I just don’t feel like talking about myself. I am happy to see you.

  She looked down at her hands lying in her lap. When people look down at their hands like that, it’s a submission.

  It’s quite possible that I’m tired of myself too.

  I pushed the glass closer to her.

  I wish I could sing right now, I said to her.

  Then I did something extraordinary, for me. I sang the only song I could think of, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” My voice cracked and slid out of tune. Tears came to her eyes and then she began to cry in earnest. She grabbed my hand and held it to her cheek.

  I had a daughter once, she said to the air in front of her. Ruby’s skin was hot now. She fought the tears back down, lost. A short wail escaped her lips, then she fought again, turning her mouth to my hand and biting my knuckle.

  She got sick and died when things were at their worst, just before OneWorld came into being. She was only six.

  I think it was at this moment I wondered how, after nineteen years of celibacy and solitude, it would be this woman who tempted me out. It was the way she strode down the street in those red heels, ready to take what she wanted without apology, yet not wanting to take anything. There was something wild about her, but ravaged too, fierce but broken, hot but drowning. It was sex, but really it was what fuelled the sex.

  I had tried dating once or twice after Jennifer and I split, but women are always hunting after your memories. They have an instinct. If they sense something hidden, shut-off, they’re on the hunt and they’re relentless, single-minded; they are evolutionarily gifted at scanning for patterns in the past that might foretell risk in the future. I could see them pick up the scent at my first evasion and a predatory instinct take hold. But Ruby had shown no interest in my past, my memories, or my problems. For which I was truly grateful. That didn’t mean I wasn’t interested in hers.

  As she bit my knuckle harder and closed her eyes, I asked myself, what was she getting in return from me? A tangle of fish hooks and wires, nuts and bolts, nails and screws, which, being shiny, might be mistaken for jewels, but were actually only a nasty jumble of the sharp and the dull, a disappointing lure, painful and prickly when snapped up, and made less dangerous only by the way I’d got the sharp parts twisted up in bindings.

  Only six years old.

  I pictured the little girl, Ruby’s daughter, looking up at her mother, holding her hand, baby fat still stored for growing. Ruby’s breath warmed my hand as she spoke.

  I carried her to the hospital, but it was overflowing. The sick were outside on the grass and in people’s yards. They gave me some pills and some water and I sat on the grass and tried to get her to swallow. I chewed up the pills and pushed them into her mouth, but she never swallowed. She took her last breaths there. I carried her back to her bed and tucked her in.

  Ruby stopped crying through an act of will. She took my hand out of her mouth and gave it back to me. Looking at my fish tank she took two deep breaths, reset her shoulders, and flipped a well-worn switch inside herself. With a factual voice she told me that after her daughter died, she and her husband Francisco were done. They’d had a good marriage but grief put them on opposite sides of a river and they had no way to cross back. Her parents were dead and she had no siblings. There was nothing to keep her, so she left. She felt like she had woken in a new world—empty, wiped clean, with her eyes open. She’d started to walk south, past suburbs and industrial parks. By then there was no electricity or gas and no cars on the roads. The border was empty. She wanted to walk down every road she found. Ruby scavenged for two full turns of the seasons—berries, fruit, snails, deserted homes, begging. There were crows everywhere, so she was never alone. Occasionally she encountered dogs that had recently packed, and she learned to keep a scrap to throw them and to carry a big stick. All that time walking, not talking to anyone, she said. One day I walked into the city. A woman on the street corner was singing opera. She wasn’t busking, she was just singing to people. It made me want to dance again.

  I think Ruby told me all of this at this point in our relationship. I listened to her with complete attention, the way you listen to instructions for operating an automatic weapon or a chainsaw, or the way you remember saying wedding vows or watching the birth of your child—I remember everything, but not necessarily in order. The information about her floats whole cloth in my mind, nonsequentially.

  I asked what kind of dance she did.

  Wrong question, she said. Not what kind, but why. I’m hungry for the new. Ravenous for the new. I’m afraid we’ll stop the process of destroying and tearing down too soon. We need to keep going if we’re going to break through to something truly different. I push the audience to stay uncertain, unsteady, to feel strong enough to keep not knowing without filling the void. I show them how, with my body.

  Ruby stopped, looked me in the eyes. That’s one reason. She paused. When I perform, I keep my daughter close. Her heart beats right after mine, her hand moves with mine. I keep her close. I feel her body beside me. I know destruction is a part of life. It isn’t personal. When I dance, I can pour gasoline on the world and light it up, and I can hold Molly in my arms and never, never put her in the ground.

  She fell silent. Took a gulp of her whiskey. Then she asked about me; more, I felt, to change the subject than out of any desire to hear my story at that moment.

  Ruby. I listened to the sound of her name in the air. I lingered on the plushness of its two syllables. Ru-by. I tilted my chair onto its hind legs. It’s not that I have regrets, I said, and craned my neck violently toward the window. What I’ve done is beyond re
gret.

  She tracked me closely.

  Everything was legal, I said, sanctioned by authority and by society, I did nothing that everyone else did not do, but over time, over time, that has revealed itself to be so much worse than nothing.

  The goldfish flashed among their plastic greenery.

  And I knew better.

  Tears rose, and I took a couple of seconds to shove them down. That was as far as I was dipping my toe in. She didn’t pursue the subject, for which I loved her.

  March 30 |

  There are two main philosophical questions to human existence. Who am I? Why am I here?

  I have lost interest in the first question. The answer no longer matters.

  But why am I here? Even now, with the worms beckoning and my Beretta vibrating at me across the counter, I feel there’s a reason, though I don’t consider the feeling trustworthy.

  March 31 |

  We humans are an impossible species. Over the next few weeks when Ruby continued to show no interest in my past, despite my relief at not having to tell, I began to feel disappointed and even somewhat annoyed. I began to trawl with a baited line.

  Did I wake you last night? I asked after I turned the alarm off one morning. Our bodies had drifted apart in sleep, but our hips were touching and her leg lay over mine. I turned on my side and scooped her in, my chin resting on her head, smelling the cedar and the oil from her hair.

  I had a nightmare that I haven’t had in years.

  When she didn’t ask what it was about, I showed more leg, so to speak.

  I worried that you might get cold because I always wake up drenched when I have that dream.