The Mercy Journals (10 page)

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 regret.

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.

She stretched—which also happened to break my embrace—and lifted her arms above her head and pointed her toes, flexing every muscle. I was beside a human board. She let out a big breath and rolled away, threw the covers off, and stood up.

No, I slept like a log, she answered breezily as she walked to the chair in the corner and began to get dressed. She seemed to keep her motions deliberately graceless.

I was beginning to feel like a two-year-old with a massive knot of conflicting needs and no ability to delay gratification. The only mature thing about me was the fact I could hide how much I was unravelling.

That evening I told her, I’d like to see your performance. She had just polished off a whole chicken, minus the leg and wing that I ate, a heap of mashed potatoes, and steamed curly kale with garlic and oil. My food ration for the month was depleted. Where can I buy a ticket?

She licked her fingers. You have an interest in dance?

Of course, I laughed. Clearly I’ve always loved dance. Season’s tickets. The works.

What herbs did you use on this chicken? One of your best yet, Allen. She looked out the window. I don’t want you to come.

What if she left one day and never came back? I would never be able to find her. I mentally tested out that reality, going back to my life as it had been before her, and discovered it would no longer be bearable. I was ruined.

Break a leg, I said peevishly.

She turned on me, eyes blazing, ready to fire, and then good humour seemed to overtake her. Okay, come. I’ll leave a ticket for you at the door. It’s at the Meany Theatre on the old university campus. Opening night is next Wednesday at eight.

The number of dance performances I’ve seen I can count on one hand, if you include my mother making me watch
Cats
and
Mamma Mia!
when I was a kid and a European film I saw a couple of years ago called
Predator vs. Alien
that I thought was going to be an action thriller but which turned out to be some kind of mix of animation, choral music, and interpretive dance. A dancer began miming death from a sickness like the one that killed Jennifer,
convulsing and arching, and I stood up and started yelling at the screen in rage. I was thrown out.

Ruby picked a bone up from her plate and gnawed at a shred of meat near the joint. I’m running an errand tomorrow, she said. I won’t be coming over.

She was so very good at leaving no room for questions.

I needed to find out where she lived. I needed something so that if she left I could find her. When I’d asked, she said she lived in a rooming house near the theatre with a shared kitchen and bathroom. She actually called my place “cozy.” No one in their right mind would call my place cozy.

I left for work at the usual time, leaving Ruby in bed with tea and cooked oats in a thermal container. On the street I texted in sick to Velma, went to the depot, and picked up a one-seater co-op car. I drove to my street and parked. The car reeked of herb. A glass jar of home-rolled butts was in the cup holder. I emptied them in the gutter. Around ten o’clock Ruby came out. She was wearing a pair of walking shoes I’d never seen before. She’d said her room was near the theatre, but when she reached Liberty Avenue, she turned away from downtown. Luckily for me, Liberty was a straight street and a main one so it was easy to follow her in spurts at a distance. She went into the Liberty Co-op depot and shortly afterward drove a vehicle out of the garage. I followed her onto the highway. We drove an extravagant fifty kilometres north, exiting just past Everett. A few minutes later she turned into the parking lot of a cemetery.

I parked on the street and followed at a distance on foot, watching her small figure walk along the driveway, then turn right and begin to thread her way through the gravestones. She disappeared from my sightline, and I guessed that she was kneeling or bending down. An hour passed. I was getting fidgety and thinking somehow she’d left without my seeing, though I couldn’t imagine how, and I was deciding whether to go looking for her when she stood up and hurried out.

I walked over to where I thought she’d been and found the reason she had come. Molly Blades, May 6, 2025–February 21, 2031, beloved daughter of Ruby and Francisco. Today was February 21, 2047.

April 1 |

The fog was mean and low as I walked to the auditorium on the edge of the old university campus. It penetrated my clothes and my skin until even my veins and vessels were chilled. A cool pale lamp above the door lit up a sandwich chalkboard displaying the words: Dance Tonight, original choreography and performance by Ruby Blades, Sam Nygaard on the tar and guitar. A long line of people, perceptible by the jiggling beams of their Callebauts, talked and moved to keep warm. I was surprised by how many people there were. I had assumed that, since the die-off, everyone was bunkered down just trying to survive, stay warm, and hope that the worst would pass them by. But no, it seemed that people had been living all along, going to the theatre, gathering for dinners, maybe even parties. I humped to the back of the line and waited.

The majority of people were under thirty, clustered in groups of three or four, knit caps pulled down, eyes peering out, scarves wound up to their lips. About a third were my age or older, and these stood in groups of two—couples or friends. I began to sour standing there in the line. I began to feel an edge of—I’d like to say it was ambivalence—about the crowd, but contempt would be more accurate. And resentment. As a soldier, it’s hard not to have some degree of contempt for high culture. None of it seems worth dying for. Or killing for.

The new names of some of the streets—Liberty Avenue for example, Liberation Street, Freedom Boulevard—also irritate me. Those words, fine words, have had their meaning
sucked dry by government propaganda. They sound like products advertised in a women’s magazine. We need names to wash the slate clean, names to release the citizens from carrying forward the baggage of the past, names to let us travel more lightly into the future. These people in the line with me—what were they here for? Were they searching for something new, were they looking for relief, for comfort, for reassurance? I couldn’t tell what they were doing here. They seemed to be very conscious of themselves and spoke loudly, as though they were the performers looking for an audience, and that irritated me too.