The Mercy Journals

by Claudia Casper

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.

  The line moved forward, and I began to worry—what if I hated her performance? What if it seemed pretentious or trivial or ridiculous? I am not a good liar. She was right; I should not have come.

  Ruby had left a ticket for me at the door. I chose a seat far enough back that she definitely wouldn’t see my face and on the aisle so I could straighten my prosthesis. A couple of rows ahead a young man with reddish-brown curls and a pale blue-eyed face was scanning the people coming in. He looked at me and smiled. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He whispered something in his friend’s ear, then stood, climbed over people’s legs, and came over to me. He held his head low and hunched, a bit like a boxer; he was strong across the shoulders but padded and soft in the middle.

  Excuse me sir, he said. I don’t mean to bother you, but you look a lot like my Uncle Allen.

  Suddenly I felt afraid, unanchored. I’d spent the last seventeen years shrinking my memory to fit a territory no bigger than my apartment and my parking beat, and now, suddenly, I worried that I’d gone too far. I had no idea who this young man was. Surely I’d remember if I had more than one brother, and if that brother had fathered more than two girls. My wife was an only child.

  You must be mistaken, I said. The young man returned to his seat.

  The lights dimmed, the audience settled, the lights went out. A spotlight exposed Ruby in its beam, her muscles already flexed, looking out at us. Her eyes were lined with black, her lips in red, her face was white, her nose angular and prominent in the stage light. The theatre was silent except for the sound of one single vibrating note plucked rhythmically on the tar. She lifted her hand and opened her fingers, like the unfolding of a fan, then reversed the motion. She lifted both hands and unfurled them. Reversed the motion. She built on a series of simple openings and closings, each time shrinking more, building t
he speed and variation, whirling in a flurry of pulsing expansion and retraction until her body folded into a ball, only her back and rounded spine visible, her limbs and head tucked and curled inside. The music stopped. She stood and folded in half, limp.

  The theatre filled with warm applause, and she rose, smiling, bringing us all in together to somewhere intimate, beautiful, and dangerous.

  Then the stage went black. Notes sounded on a guitar this time—graceful, intricate—and a light came up on the musician, a man about forty years old, folded intimately over his instrument. I wanted to kill him. A blue light came up on Ruby who stood, head bent, waiting. She raised her head, and a slow, hypnotic melody came out of her, something about the birds are singing, but where are you, they sing their hearts out while my heart stays empty. She sang a verse in another language, I think it was Portuguese, and the volume of her voice built until it soared over the room. Watching her, my eyes felt like rivets drilled into the side of a tank. Tight, close. Every movement she made, every sound she uttered was heightened, stripped bare, exposed in a raw clarity. She created and destroyed herself over and over, pushing herself to physical and emotional extremes I found unimaginable. She became otherworldly to me. The woman on the stage was the woman who ate at my table and slept in my bed—but she inhabited two worlds, and one, the world on the stage, was unreachable to me. I was in awe. My heart ached.

  The performance closed with an old blues song—Sometimes I feel like a motherless child—but she added an element—Sometimes I feel like a childless mother, and folded her arms around emptiness.

  I silenced a sob in my throat but could not hold back the tears. I wiped my face on my sleeve several times. When the lights came up I was still wiping my face. The young man glanced back at me, and I nodded. His friends were leaving. He grabbed one of them by the elbow, said something, then fought the departing crowd to come to me.

  My name’s Griffin. I’m your brother’s stepson. The last time you saw me I was, like, fourteen, so you might not recognize me.

  I was astonished. I remembered really liking him. He told me he was now growing carrots. He’d studied agronomy and specialized in irrigation and soil sciences. And he played in a band. Just broke up with his girlfriend. Lived on the edge of town but it was an easy bike ride in.

  He glanced up at the balcony. He said, It was like the family dropped off the face of the earth after Nan’s funeral. I assumed everyone had died.

  I looked away too. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear about who made it and who didn’t.

  How are you, Uncle Allen?

  Let me give you my coordinates, I said. You haven’t seen my sons by any chance?

  No.

  I did see Leo recently.

  He looked wary, but interested. Does Leo know where my mother and sisters are?

  I don’t think so.

  Griffin got his mobile out and I gave him my information.

  Do you want to grab a drink? he asked.

  Don’t drink anymore. Besides, I winked, I’m with the dancer.

  He grinned. No shit!

  Griffin, I have to tell you. I’m a wreck. I don’t have anything to offer.

  He looked at me and shrugged. I miss the family. Nan, everyone, but I’m okay you know. I don’t need anything.

  I told him he’d be welcome to drop by my place any time. He pulled on his toque and bounced out of there.

  I waited for Ruby on a broken chair outside the dressing room. The musician left. About a quarter of an hour later, she opened the door. Her hair was plastered to her skull except for a few wisps that had dried. She was drawn and pale and sunken under the eyes. I worried whether she would have the strength to walk in those red sandals, whether her bare legs would get too cold. I started to tell her what I thought about her performance, and she put her finger to my lips. No words.

  Back at my place I wrapped a blanket around her, made her some tea, and cooked dinner. She ate automatically, her usual enormous quantity but without her usual gusto. I washed the dishes, led her to bed, took her shoes off, and lay down beside her as she slipped into a deep sleep. I wasn’t tired. I stared out the window at the dark, which, over the period of half an hour, gained a thin light. Must have been from the moon and stars. The clouds must’ve blown away. Eventually that black turned to navy, then to ever-lightening shades of gray.

  I didn’t go to work. It was International Cooperation Day. I brought her tea, then let her fall back asleep with her head on my shoulder. I guess my heartbeat rocked her dreams. I was alive again, and she was responsible.

  April 2 |

  I’ve been writing for three weeks now and my ambush is almost laid. Writing about Ruby has distracted me from my torment, but I’m getting tired. Velma gives me the hairy eyeball when I come into work and sniffs the air to show me she smells the booze. Larry avoids looking at me. I woke this morning filled with dread and sorrow, the fragments still with me from a dream about Ruby being locked in some kind of hut with giant chicken legs and me fighting through worms to try and unlock the door. The hut took off over the hills, and I called in anguish as she vanished. The tentacles of that anguish reach through to waking reality. I must pounce soon or I won’t make it.

  Ruby and I had a couple of blissful weeks after I saw her performance. She came over every night to eat and sleep. I never went to her place.

  Then I mentioned the boys. It was a Sunday, and we’d gone back to bed after eating a big breakfast. I think the happiness and warmth with her was making me unguarded, and I let the feeling of missing them come out.

  You have sons! And you don’t try to find them? What kind of man are you? You work at this job, day in, day out, while your children are in the world without you?

  They’re grown men, Ruby.

  Children grow up. That’s the point.

  I did my duty by them.

  Wow.

  She leapt out of bed, grabbed my T-shirt, put it on, and went and stood by the window. She looked up at the sky with her arms wrapped tight around herself and gnawed the side of her finger.

  You know. If I had my daughter …

  I was a drowning man. Everything had been going along swimmingly and suddenly I was drowning. Hey, I’m drowning here! I wanted to yell to someone on the shore.

  I am the kind of man whose sons are better off without him, I said.

  She looked up higher at the sky and pressed herself against the window as though every part of her wanted to leave this room.

  How to explain such a statement? I’d have to tell her my story. I’m a soldier—we’re wired to risk our lives. I could tell her the memories that bring the knives out and slice through my mind like a sushi chef. I ran through the risk/reward calculations. Then something in me bolted.

  Besides, I said, it’s not really any of your business.

  A look of disgust came into her eyes. She got dressed and left.

  I was so restless I had to leave my apartment. I exhausted myself walking all over the city. Over the next few days my stump blistered badly from constant friction with my prosthesis and I worried no amount of cream would prevent callusing.

  April 3 |

  The worms are out in full regalia. They’re wearing party hats of green and pink and yellow, tossing confetti, and doing the can-can.

  Allen! We knew you’d come!

  They take my arm to lead me down the hall where the party is. I am dazed and numb. I don’t know if I’m coming or going. I have no will and no fear. But as I’m being ushered by joyous threadlike arm after arm, I feel they are rushing me. I feel, behind their gaiety, they want to get me into the party before I change my mind. I try to come to a stop, to dig in my heel, but the force of all those cilia-like arms pushing me toward the entrance and the slight imbalance of my one leg mean I can only slow my pace.

  Allen? They raise their eyebrows and look at me with disapproving sadness and disappointment. What’s wrong, Allen? This party’s for you. We’ve gone to so much trouble. Don’t you like it?
/>
  I catch a glimpse of a steel coffin and a posse of worms on top trying to pry it open with a crowbar.

  I turn the top half of my body to face the direction in which I came and start to fight my way back, keeping my arms close and my head down like a quarterback. They ramp up the gaiety, laughing and dancing and hugging each other, and I have to knock a few down (they offer a soft, springy resistance) to get back through the portal.

  April 4 |

  A week passed and Ruby stayed away. I couldn’t bear being home, but walking long distances was no longer an option because the callused skin on my stump cracked, so I’d go down by Duwamish Waterway and sit on a bench.

  Nobody lingers outside anymore. The wind, the rain, the sun, the clouds, they all make us uneasy. I don’t know why anyone bothered to make the bench. No one will ever sit there.

  I sat and looked across the waterway, ten times wider than in the old days. New leaves were a yellow-green blur against bark that glowed pink with new sap. Six meters in front of me the masts of sunken yachts from the old marina stuck out of the water at odd angles. The long evening progressed and fog slunk in, hugging the shoreline at first, then gradually spreading out over the water.

  Ten women walking down a path on my right interrupted my solitude. They pulled ropes attached to a trailer carrying a dragon boat. Silently, they eased the contraption down to the water’s edge and set the boat in the water. The drummer set up her drum and took her perch, the sweep positioned herself at the stern, and the rest got in and pushed off onto the grey-green water, rowing slowly backward, the sweep calling out instructions to avoid shallow-water obstacles. They disappeared in the fog. The last thing I saw was the boat’s green dragon head with its red tongue lolling out between white teeth. Then I heard the drum. I assumed they’d reached deeper water.

  In some ways the world is more beautiful than it was before. On the eighth evening what I had to do came clear. I humped and stumped over to the library.