Claudia Casper - The Mercy Journals

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.

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.

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.

My sons. I believe they are better off without me. When Jennifer gave birth to them, I’d felt ferocious — I would fight for them, I would kill for them, I would die for them — but when I came back from my last tour of duty the question had been: could I live for them? I’d been trying to protect them by staying distant, but now, with Ruby opening me up, maybe I did have something to offer them.

The library chair was a hard wooden one at a long wooden table. I rested my head on my hands on the table. Already my inner cats were starting to yowl and hiss. Their claws were starting to penetrate the bag and scratch at my intestines and the membrane around my heart. The tight band I’d forged around my life to keep it purified of importance had been weakened by Ruby, and my life was expanding like a down sleeping bag being pulled out of a stuffbag. But with the softening of the heart came harder things that poked their noses out and I could feel aggression concentrating in their snouts and honing in. I was going to have to act quickly.

The web grid has expanded again gradually since the die-off, though it’s still nowhere near what it was before. Only people in cities have mobiles and only fifty percent at that. With the latest web expansion, a missing persons site has at last been created. Velma found her sister and a childhood girlfriend through it. Larry found his father. The librarian gave me the site address and I set up an account. Three messages popped up for an Allen Levy Quincy, last residing in Cascadia. My heart filled with doom. I opened the mailbox. Old messages from Leo, Griffin, and a cousin on my father’s side from Utah, now the Administrative Department of the Great Plains. I posted my boys’ names, Luke Quincy (Leapin’ Luke) and Sam Quincy (Smokin’ Sam or Smoke), and filled in the date last seen, location last seen, relationship, and my coordinates.

I did it for Ruby. But I also hoped it would be good for all of us. They were almost grown men when they left. They’d be able to decide for themselves.

I could have looked through the obituaries but could not bear the thought of finding their names there.

When I found Ruby again I didn’t want to appear as desperate as I was, but deception has never been my strong point. My only strategy therefore was to be direct and honest. I went over to the university and bought a ticket for her performance. It was closing night, which gave me a chill. I’d almost lost her. After the performance I waited outside her dressing room. When she opened the door, I pulled off my toque and began to sing a Nirvana song my first babysitter introduced me to, “Come as You Are.” I leaned in close and sang in a whisper, starting with the instrumental part.

I stopped at the song’s bridge, thinking that swearing you don’t have a gun wouldn’t hit the emotional note I was aiming for. I told her I had registered my sons on the missing persons website. I told her I missed her. And then I said, I have something to tell you, something I’ve never told anyone, something it might destroy me to tell. I think it’s the only way forward. She cocked her head and raised an eyebrow.

I was hurtling into space strapped to a bucket seat. We got to my apartment and I led her to bed and undressed her, my heart exploding. We made love twice and I let out a holler, an indefinable sound. She laughed. I fed her. She fell asleep and I dozed.

I woke up a couple of hours before sunrise. I put on my leg and my bathrobe and stole quietly out to the kitchen. I put my overcoat on over my bathrobe to keep warm, poured some cold tea, and sat in my chair looking out the window at the blackness. I began to make out the shapes of clouds moving across the sky, then the blooms of a magnolia across the street started to glow through their net. A cyclist floated by, the beam of his Callebaut projecting a thin line of light from the handlebars.

In a way, everything in my life before now seemed to have had the purpose of bringing me to this moment with the intention of speaking. And having arrived at this moment, there was no way back. My old strategy was in ruins. Ruby, with her prodigious appetite and big stride, had woken me up and going back to sleep was not an option. Everything seemed volatile and impermanent.