Claudia Casper - The Mercy Journals

All my cats were stuffed in a bag and sleeping well together. I hardly ever went off the deep end anymore, and when I did I usually had warning. Sometimes I even managed to watch myself calmly in an “out of mind” rather than “out of body” state. In those days, before she walked into my life, I inhabited a barebones state of nirvana, watching the flies buzz hypothermically in the cold air and rivulets of water run into cracks of shattered pavement.

But she showed me for a fake. All my equanimity sprang from one thing, and one thing only, which was not that my life was nearing any kind of enlightenment, not at all. It was that I was dead.

The city was quiet with a quiet that didn’t exist before the die-off. No traffic or pile-drivers, leaf blowers or airplanes, just the hum of an occasional electric vehicle, the tinkle of cyclists’ bells, and the sound of gears spinning. It was dinnertime, and hardly anyone was about. I was on my way home from work, just passing the community dining hall where people eat to save deductions from their monthly power ration from cooking. The hall’s side door by the kitchen was wedged open, and the percussion of plates and cutlery and chairs spilled onto the sidewalk, but instead of the usual roar of conversation, a woman’s voice addressed the diners over a sound system. I paused.

You have to OPT out — One Pure Thing — one pure thing to dedicate yourself to, she proclaimed. Freedom or love or nature or community. Opting out gives your life simplicity and purpose. I am opting out for freedom. That’s my cause. A trolley full of dirty dishes went by and one of the wheels jammed on a potato peel, so I missed the next part of the speech to the clatter. I started hearing her again at … never belonged to the corporations, and it doesn’t belong to the government either. OneWorld is good enough right now but, she snapped her fingers, like that it could change, and what could we do about it? They have all the information, all the records of our civilization in their control, and we have nothing but what we know in our heads and the few books remaining in our libraries and on our bookshelves. That knowledge belongs to us. We made it. Tomorrow we march for the right to elect representatives to protect our birthright! Noon at the old post office!

I’ve always hated politics. Even before. I get restless at the mere mention. So I simply took it as a sign that things were getting better if people had the energy to demonstrate and continued on my way home. A few blocks later, as I was stepping carefully over a large slab of broken pavement and listening to the wind snap sheets of plastic tacked across the broken windows high up in the old post office, a new sound penetrated my consciousness. Clack, clack, clack. It was the kind of sound you don’t realize you haven’t heard for ages until you hear it, and then you instantly realize how long it’s been absent.

The contact of the high heels with the paving was stable and assured, so not a spike heel, I assumed, yet the pitch of the contact was too high and airy for a thick heel. The pace was quick though not clipped or striding. Purposeful.

I am a large man and can defend myself against most members of my species, prosthesis notwithstanding. I am blessed with a dense skeleton and well-defined muscles whose only limitation is lack of flexibility. My hands have the weight of hammers. I don’t fear being overpowered by an antagonist but, since my illness, I only have two minutes before I break down. Crying doesn’t do it justice. Torrents, gasping, mucusy sobs and tremors. I am trained in Krav Maga and I’m quick, so I haven’t failed yet.

The steps came up behind me on the left and a perfume, a complex scent — tea, cloves, freshly mown grass — expanded its radius around me. I knew exactly where she was without looking.

When she passed I could have turned my left hand sideways and grazed her hip with my thumb. I had an impulse to reach for her wrist. My eyes slid to the left and saw her naked foot in a red high-heeled sandal, the skin of her heel callused and slightly cracked, her baby toe turned out. The grey-blue light of the cold January dusk made her skin almost fluorescent. The tendons and muscles of her foot seemed hyper-defined and taut in their attachments to the small bones. Her foot so enchanted me that I only thought to look at her face after she had passed. The back of a large army-green bomber jacket with black trim and gold-buttoned epaulets, possibly from some kind of uniform, flapped open above a brown dress with a fringe of rags. She marched to the end of the block, dark ponytail swinging, turned right, and looked directly at me before disappearing down the street.

I hurried to the corner, hump and stump, hump and stump, but the street was empty. I turned my mobile on to see the time: five-thirty p.m.

I climbed the three floors to my apartment by memory because the only light inside the stairwell is from a skylight. I fumbled my key into the lock, turned it, and opened the door. The living room was dimly visible in the blue glow of other people’s lights spilling in from the building’s courtyard. My furniture: a green velvet easy-chair, beat-up even by today’s existential standards, stuffing bubbling out at the arm and seat cushion; a worn leather ottoman; a white bookshelf that’s wobbly because the hardware’s reamed out the disintegrating particleboard; a wooden bar stool; a table with three chairs; my charging station; and flashes of gold under the cool light of my aquarium. I took my coat off and hung it on a hook by the door. That hook, a classic bronze one like we used to have in school locker rooms, is the only change I’ve made to this apartment.

Billions die from starvation, thirst, disease, and war, violence is done to the mind, a human life shrinks to the emotional range of a hummingbird guarding his territory, cataclysms come and go, yet someone of the opposite sex walks by and really looks at you and your whole world comes to a stop.

I swear that with that first look from the end of the block she saw me — the soul I was born with, the man I had become, and the thorny crosshatch of my life — wounds received and wounds delivered. She saw my strength and my — I won’t say weakness — my ruinedness. In that instant, when she looked back, I knew she was interested in me. I mean, why not? With my fake leg, the scar on the left side of my face, a body on the downhill slide past fifty, sterling-grey highlights in my hair, and riveting, half-dead eyes, I’d be hard for any woman to pass up, let alone a woman with bare legs striding through the evening haze in red heels.

I went into the kitchen and opened the coolbox. I pride myself on keeping it neat and stocked only with the essentials, yet sometimes I still can’t seem to find anything inside it. I could hear my mom — Close the fridge, you’re letting the cold out — not that it matters anymore, at least not in winter, because the temperature inside the coolbox is virtually the same as inside our homes.

I stared at a carton of eggs, a packet of sausages, half a bottle of goat milk, and a bowl of puckering apples, unable to remember what I wanted. The sound of heels on the sidewalk echoed in my head, accompanied by the image of pale, slightly blue feet.

I went looking for her the next evening, same route, same routine, hoping she’d repeat her path. I leaned against the wall at the exact point where she’d passed the night before. I looked up at the sky. For once it wasn’t raining or windy. Twenty minutes passed. A man walking on the other side of the road stopped and yelled, Hey Mercy! Is that you? What the fuck!

I don’t swear. My father stopped swearing near the age of forty-nine when he was doing graduate studies in history for a promotion to Brigadier General and he had what he called an epiphany: swearing devalued the profession. Predictably, he decided to impose his epiphany on his family. My mom, a high-school English teacher, ignored him and kept swearing like a trooper. My younger brother Leo argued that since Dad had had thirty good years of swearing, he and I still had thirty coming before our bill was due.