The Mercy Journals (9 page)

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 …

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 fortune 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.