Claudia Casper - The Mercy Journals

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.

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.