Claudia Casper - The Mercy Journals

As I was considering my answer to this question, I heard pounding. The noise persists and I am thinking maybe it exists outside my head. Maybe someone is pounding on the door.

Allen! Allen! I know you’re in there, bro. Open up. I got a plan I want to tell you about.

I lay my pencil down. My mother’s journal is puffy now, the pages crinkled from the force of the pencil lead pressing down on the paper. He can’t be certain I’m here.

C’mon, Allen. Hear me out, he thumps again. It’s the last thing I’ll ask of you before I die. One last thing. Open the door.

I see now that a writer is a kind of tactician with a limited array of materiel. One must consider how to deploy one’s weapons and plan the order, timing, and pacing: attack, ambush, invade, surrender. I believe I have failed. My strategy has failed.

Leo thumps on the door again, a frustrated whack. C’mon, ya bastard, open up! It’s a good plan. You owe me a hearing at least. Then, in a wheedling voice, I heard your boys are there. We gotta go find them.

I leap up and pull the door open. Leo’s crouching by the keyhole. He looks up at me.

My boys! How have you heard from them? Do you have their coordinates?

No, no, I don’t.

You’re lying. You don’t know anything.

I heard. I heard from a guy.

I am going to close the door now. Don’t bother me again. I close the door.

C’mon, bro. What you got to lose?

I feel like I pulled the pin on a grenade but I’m failing to throw it.

I go to pour a drink. One of the goldfish floats up to the surface. Its beautiful, translucent fins, white and long, look like the thing at the end of a wedding dress.

My story becomes a betrayal in the writing down of it. It’s a sordid little deal: in exchange for exposing the suffering and death of other people to any Tom, Dick, or Harry who might happen to read my words, I, their murderer, get my life back.

No.

Not doing it.

Grandparents, godparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins: I could whisper the description of the victim’s last minutes to them, but not to a stranger who never loved them. (That word, “victim,” how I loathe it. The people trying to cross the border were people, not a subset, “victims.” They should not be defined by the genocide, defined by an act they had nothing to do with. Only we, the murderers, the genociders, should be defined.) I don’t even know if this will be read, or if you, my theoretical reader, a stranger, will indulge in the schadenfreude that you, at least, are still alive, or worse, if you’ll get a manic jolt, a whiff of omnipotence, the pleasure of power over others ignited in you, but I must assume the possibility because you, my reader, if you exist, will also be human.

Writing is pornographic. It is like forcing prisoners to perform a striptease of their suffering in front of an anonymous crowd — their exposure a final, sadistic, posthumous indignity.

I grasp my head between my hands and squeeze.

They’re dead, I whisper. What expense to them if I pinch their pockets? Their souls, already long released, what does it matter to them if I tell their story to save my soul?

I get up to pour myself another depth charge. My hand is shaking. I’ve lost count, but I just drained another bottle of R & R that, mere hours ago, was full. Two empties stand beside it. There’s still one more full bottle waiting under the kitchen sink. I haven’t been outside in three days. I haven’t returned Velma’s text messages. I’m not sure I’ll ever go back to work. I haven’t slept and I’m down to a jar of pickles and a box of stale crackers.

While I’m shoving crackers in my mouth Leo comes back. I want to strangle him. He bangs on my door and calls my name, then I hear the fabric of his clothes rub the door as he slumps to the floor. He’s breathing heavily. While I’m wondering if he’s passed out and whether I can tiptoe back to the table, another set of footsteps comes up the stairs. I cringe and crouch into a ball.

Who the fuck are you? Leo slurs.

Is this the apartment of Allen Quincy?

Who wansa know?

I’m Mr Quincy’s nephew.

Well I’m Mr Quincy’s only brother and I don’t have sons, so that’s gotta make you my stepson.

Silence.

Leo?

No shit.

Uncle Allen wasn’t sure he’d see you again.

So sudge luck.

Silence.

You wanna come to Nirvana?

The cabin?

A grunt.

He’s not here. Take me downstairs. Grabba bite.

I bring my drink back to the table, glad they’re gone.

When I told Ruby about the genocide on the border, the words were warm from my breath, but when I wrote them down they turned hard and armoured, and this fills me with disgust. Of course writing doesn’t destroy memory, I’ve known that since just after I started, yet it does alter memory and it does destroy living memory. I thought that might be enough. Who can shoot the written word? Who can punish it or kill it? Does it die from lack of oxygen? From a broken heart? From shame? Can it lose its soul? But writing also turns private memory out onto the street like an underage runaway and makes me feel like both a pimp and a john, as well as a murderer.

My plan has failed. I’ll never be cured.

Instead I’ll keep guard over the only thing left to my dead: their place in my memory. I’ll keep them nestled in the warmth of the pinky — grey, plushy folds of my brain, singing their requiem with electric pings leaping from neuron to neuron, spreading out in myriad branches behind the armour of my skull, their existence only as immortal as I am, tender and private, for as long as we both shall live. I will heave my shoulder to the door and use my mind as a weapon to protect them from oblivion.

I have arrived at the exact opposite result of what I intended, a turn of events that, I imagine, is not unfamiliar to writers. I’m so tired. I’ll pour one more R & R and slip into the black velvet arms of sleep.

I talked to Ruby well into the afternoon that day as the light brightened then waned. I emptied my memory onto her, obscenely, and she lay there and took it. Two people alone in a room.

I don’t know what I expected. I was compelled to speak, regardless of the result, there was no other way out, but I suppose what I hoped was that the universe, like some kind of divine escort service, had sent Ruby to bring me happiness. All the sex of the previous six weeks — I had mistaken the experience for rebirth, but rebirth doesn’t happen from the outside.

When I stopped speaking she made no comment. It was around four in the afternoon. We stared at the ceiling for a while, side by side.

I’m hungry, she said, and that was proven by an outrageous growl from her belly.

I had laid my intestines out for her to see and now I had the humiliating task of looping them up again and trying to tuck them back in, in front of her. It was going to take some time and the smell wouldn’t be the best. Meanwhile, she had shown me nothing.

I dragged myself into the kitchen, to get away from her, to hide the horror that was Allen Quincy. I made her dinner. Her appetite, which had been such a delight at first, such a surprise and a joy, had become oppressive.

What did I cook? I took out some potatoes, kidney beans, a can of tomatoes. I made her a mash. It took an hour in the pressure cooker. She stayed in my bedroom, for which I was grateful. When it was cooked I added salt. I called her and managed to tuck in the last loop of guts before she came into the room and sat down. I slopped the mush into the bowl in front of her. Not my most appetizing looking meal.

She looked at it. She picked up her spoon and leaned over her bowl, my bowl, and spoke. I’m fighting my own battle Quincy. I don’t have the strength to fight yours. She turned her head and glanced quickly at me. There were tears in her eyes. She looked back down at the slop I’d dished out. Whatever you want from me? What do you want? Whatever you want, her voice rose, you’ve opened a door here. She looked around, like a cornered animal. She was getting ready to bolt. You’ve opened a door here, she repeated.