Claudia Casper - The Mercy Journals

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.

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.

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.