Claudia Casper - The Mercy Journals

I thought: maybe I have another ten years to live, maybe twenty. I want her in them if possible. I thought: time could be a large airy room we inhabit together. She would never abide being cornered and we both had wounds that wouldn’t heal, wounds that required privacy, yet I thought in a big enough space we could love each other.

Speaking now was the only way forward yet the risks were chittering and hissing and fluttering in the air around me.

I thought about the smallest particle of matter, the Higgs boson that Ruby had mentioned, changing from the force of being looked at.

Eventually a guttural, exhaling growl of pleasure, the kind people make when they stretch, came from my bedroom. I put the kettle on and brought my beloved a hot cup of tea. She had one arm above her head and held that hand with the other and pulled, stretching the side of her body. I put the tea on the floor beside the bed, sat down, and rested a hand on her leg, which was under the covers.

From my seat in the dark theatre I had seen a crowd pass through her: orphan, refugee, seductress, gatherer, pregnant mother, madwoman, oracle, huntress. She was a childless mother, a gypsy, and an artist who knew the world, yet no one knew her. I wanted to be the man who knew her. I felt the pulse in her leg under my hand. I felt her, but I did not know her, not in the way I’d known Jennifer. In the old days I would never have loved Ruby; she would have been too unfamiliar, too unpredictable.

She sipped her tea and looked at me. It felt like we were in a space capsule.

Sitting on my bed with my hand on her leg I believed it could work. I could tell her and we would live happily ever after, safe on the platform of my bed, two bodies making love and bringing home food and news until we grew old and died. The best ending a human can hope for.

I lay down beside her and started to talk at the ceiling. I moved into hyper-clarity, tracing the tiny valleys and peaks of the stucco’s texture. I can summon the exact shade of grey made by the light coming through my window on the dark side of each knobble of plaster.

She lay on her side looking at me, her hands tucked under her face, satisfied, relaxed, full. That was a miracle. I jumped off the cliff and began.

Two years before the die-off peaked, my battalion was deployed to a camp in the desert to guard the border wall between Mexico and the North. The main conflict, you’ll remember, was in the Arctic Circle, keeping the Russians and Norwegians out, but we were sent south. The Mexicans were blowing holes in the wall because they desperately needed water. When we arrived the breaches had been filled with barbed-wire coils and at night the place was lit up like a movie set. We heard stuff like this was going on along the length of the entire wall. On the second night the wind began to blow. Even with masks on, we breathed in the dust. It was like being on Mars. I didn’t think anything could survive out there in the dark without masks, without water.

Tumbleweeds would get caught in the wire coils, then the wind would shift and the weeds would be blown back into the dark or come straight at us and make us jump. One night, sometime before dawn, three RPGS went off and a couple of our guys got hit by fragmentation. The flash from the launcher showed as a brief glow on the other side of the wall but in all that dust you couldn’t see smoke trails to pinpoint the origin. The tumbleweeds started really freaking everyone out. You’d be peering into the brown haze lit by the spotlights and this round ball would catapult out of nowhere into your face. I put my weapon down and tried to karate chop the suckers before they touched me. I remember the feel of dried sticks roiling off the side of my hand and some of the twigs blowing into my face. And I remember the dust. And the brown haze. And the dust from the new holes in the wall that we couldn’t see until we got lights on them, but sensed as a darker patch in the haze.

Ruby rolled onto her back and joined me staring at the ceiling. I took a few shallow breaths and continued.

By the time we shipped out three months later to go back home we were just lucky there was enough fuel for the buses. We had to carry all the fuel for the journey back with us. As we entered the base my sons must’ve heard the buses because they came racing into the clearing area. They flew at me when I stepped out of the door. I placed my hand on their shaggy heads and looked for Jennifer.

The heat of their skulls radiated through their damp hair and I was filled with revulsion. For three months all I’d wanted was to return home to them and now I jerked my hand away and covered my behaviour by getting the boys to look for my bag and challenging them to carry it all the way home.

As I spoke I was hyper-aware of Ruby’s breathing. We weren’t touching. Out of the blue a desire for a drink hit me hard and I had to stop talking and wait for it to pass. Ruby’s breathing was as steady as a metronome.

The boys took turns carrying my bag. Sam dragged it more than carried it back to the house. I don’t know why Jennifer didn’t come out to the buses. She must’ve known it was our battalion. My parents, who’d moved back onto the base when the troubles started, hurried over. Jennifer stood holding the door open for the boys to drag my bag in, and my parents hovered behind her. My mom didn’t look good. She was thin and pale and hunched over.

I got to the foot of the steps and hesitated. I didn’t want to pass over the doorsill. I looked down at the ground. I noticed the blades of grass, some green, some yellow, and clover and buttercups. A line of ants beside the path was running bits of leaf. I noticed them meet head on and sort out their impulses, go left or go right, two choices, a binary decision. I started to cry. Jennifer ran down the stairs to hug me and I held up my arm — No — my first word back.

I did eventually walk into the house. No one wanted to upset me, so they hung back, waiting for a sign. I went to the bathroom and locked the door. They must’ve heard the weird gasping sounds I made trying to sob silently. After a while, my dad came to the door and spoke. I wasn’t sobbing out of grief. It was just a way to let off pressure. I wasn’t feeling anything except that I didn’t want them to know how numb I was. I opened the bathroom door and announced, I’m going to the den to play some video games.

I started drinking heavily and playing on-line games all day. The army shrink told my family that it was post-traumatic stress disorder. It was, but it was also more than that. My whole understanding of the world had changed. My father took me out for a beer. I drank four to his one. Five to his one. Son, he said. Tell me what happened. I’m ashamed to say that I went on the attack. I belittled his service. I belittled him for never having killed.

Ruby clasped her hands below her breasts above the blankets. She lay like a painting of drowned Ophelia — hair spread out — very pale, as people in excellent physical condition sometimes are after extreme exertion. I couldn’t tell for sure if she was listening.

My father reached across the table and grasped my forearm in his strong, dry hand. My leg was going like a pneumatic drill. I was trembling and sweating and glancing wildly all over the place. I searched his face with the faint hope that he might have something to offer, some wisdom or knowledge, but there was nothing. All I saw was helplessness and love. He loved me. He really loved me.

I told him I had to go and downed my glass and fled before I hurt him any more. It was the last time I saw him healthy. He died two weeks later of the influenza.

I paused in my telling just as I’ve paused now, in my writing. Breathed. Breathed in. Then jumped headlong.