Claudia Casper - The Mercy Journals

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?

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.