Mercy (68 page)

want and the ones you deplore, you ain’t allowed indifference,

you have to decide on a relationship then and there on the spot

because each one that passes pisses on you to let you know he’s

there. There’s some few you made love with and yo u ’re still

breathing tight with them, you can still feel their muscles

swelling through their skin and bearing down on you and you

can still feel their weight on you, an urgent concentration o f

blood and bone, hot muscle, spread over you, the burden o f it

sinking into you, a stone cliff into a wet shore, and yo u ’re still

tangled up in them, good judgm ent aside, and it’s physical, it’s

a physical m em ory, in the body, not just in the brain, barely in

the brain at all, you got their sweat on you as part o f your

sweat and their smell’s part o f your smell and you have an ache

for them that’s deep and gnawing and hurtful in more than

your heart and you still feel as if it’s real and current, now: how

his body moves against you in convulsions that are awesome

like mountains m oving, slow, burdensome, big, and how you

m ove against him as i f you could m ove through him, he’s the

ocean, yo u ’re the tide, and it’s still cunt, he says cunt. H e’s

indelibly in you and you don’t want redemption so much as

you want him and still it’s cunt. It’s w hat’s true; Andrea’s the

lie. It’s a lie we got to tell, Jane and Judith and Ellen and

whom ever. It’s our most desperate lie. M y mother named me

Andrea. It means manhood or courage. It means not-cunt. She

specifically said: not-cunt. This one ain’t cunt, she declared,

after blood spilled and there was the pain o f labor so intense

that God couldn’t live through it and w ouldn’t which is w hy

all the pain’s with us and still she brought herself to a point o f

concentration and she said: not-cunt. This one’s someone, she

probably had in mind; a wish; a hope; let her, let her,

something. Something. Let her something. D on ’t, not with

this one. Just let this one through. Just don’t do it to this one.

She wrote: not-cunt, a fiction, and it failed, and the failure

defeated her and turned her cold to me, because before I was

even ten some man had wrote “ this one’s cunt, ” he took his

fingers and he wrote it down on me and inside me, his fingers

carved it in me with a pain that stayed half buried and there

wasn’t words I had for what he did, he wrote I was cunt, this

sweet little one who was what’s called a child but a female one

which changes it all. M y mama showed that fiction was

delusion, hallucination, it was a long, deranged lie designed to

last past your own lifetime. The man, on the other hand, was a

pragmatist, a maker o f reality, a shaper o f history, an

orchestrator o f events. He used life, not paper, bodies, not ink.

The Nazis, o f course, synthesized the two: bodies and ink.

Y ou can’t even say it would solve the problem to have

numbers on us, inked on. Numbers is as singular as names

unless we are all zero,
0
, we could all be
0
; Pauline Reage

already suggested it, o f course, but she’s a demagogue and a

utopian, a kind o f Stalinist o f female equality, she wants us all

equal on the bottom o f anything that’s mean enough to be on

top; it has a certain documentary quality. Unlike Reage, my

mother just made it up, and her fiction was a lie, almost

without precedent, not recognized as original or great, a

voyage o f imagination; it was just a fucking lie. I don’t want to

tell lies, not for moral reasons but it’s m y idea o f pride, you

name it, I can take it. I was born in a city where the walls were

falling down; I didn’t see many solid walls. The streets were

right next to you it seemed because you could always hear the

buzz, the hum, the call, as if drums were beckoning you to the

tribal dance; you could see the freedom. Inside was small and

constrained with rules designed to make you some kind o f

trained cockroach and outside was forever, a path straight to

the heart o f the world; there were no limits, it spread out in

front o f you to anywhere, with anyone. Limits were another

lie, a social fiction all the zombies got together to tell. The

destination was always the street because the destination was

always freedom; out from under; no rule on top o f you. Y ou

could almost look through the brick, which was crumbling,

and you had this sense that every building had holes in it, a

transparency, and that no walls were ever finished or ever

lasted; and the cement outside was gray, cracked, streaked

with blood from where they threw you down to have fun with

you on hot nights and cold nights, the boys with their cars and

knives; I knew some o f those boys; I loved Nino who said

“ make love” as if it was something real special and real nice

and so fine, so precious and kind and urgent, his eyes burned

and his voice was low and soft and silk, it wrapped itself

around you, he didn’t reach out, he didn’t m ove towards you,

you had to let him know, you had to; I could still fucking die

for what he promised with his brilliant seduction, a poor,

uneducated boy, but when he did it I got used to being hurt

from behind, he used his knife, he made fine lines o f blood,

delicate, and you didn’t dare m ove except for your ass as he

wanted and you didn’t know if yo u ’d die and you got to love

danger i f you loved the boy and danger never forsakes you; the

boy leaves but danger is faithful. Y ou knew the cement under

you and the brick around you and the sound o f the boys

speeding by in their cars and the sudden silence, which meant

they were stalking you. I was born in Camden down the street

from where Walt Whitman lived, M ickle Street, he was the

great gray poet, the prophetic hero o f oceanic verse; also not-

cunt. Great poet; not-cunt. It’s like a mathematical equation

but no one learns it in school by heart; it ain’t written down

plain on the blackboard. It’s algebra for girls but no one’s

going to teach you. Y ou get brought down or throwed down

and you learn for yourself. There’s no mother on earth can

bear to explain it. I can’t write down what happened and I can’t

tell lies. T here’s no words for what happened and there’s

barely words for the lies. if I was a man I would say something

about fishing and it would be a story, a perfectly fine one too;

the bait, the hook, the lake, the wind, the shore, and then

everything else is the manly stuff. If I was a man at least I’d

know what to say, or I’d say it so grand it wouldn’t matter if it

was true or not; anyone’d recognize it and say it was art. I

could think o f something important, probably; recognizably