Claudia Casper - The Mercy Journals

Who’s here? I called out, but I thought I knew. Someone came into the bedroom. I tried to open my eyes but everything was still spinning and lurching. I glimpsed Ruby’s hair, then had to shut my eyes again.

Have we met before? she asked.

No, I don’t believe we have.

Who are you?

As you see. A dizzy one-legged man.

Why were you waiting for me?

I saw you the other day.

Hmm.

My nineteen years of celibacy had been effortless and so complete that not even a kiss had brushed my lips.

What do we do now, Allen Quincy?

It would help if I could open my eyes without the room hurling itself into every dimension known to man. Could we start over tomorrow?

I felt her looking at me. I had never thought of eyes as weapons, or as shields, but I was defenseless, unable to open my eyes and look back at her. I did manage to lift the corner of an eyelid and see her tongue lick her lips and disappear back into her mouth. I had to shut the eyelid again because the ceiling tilted to the floor, the nearby wall whipped past the ceiling, and the light fixture ricocheted off everything. I gripped the side of the mattress.

Her hand covered mine, the inside of her wrist touched the hairy back of my wrist, and she leaned over and pressed her warm lips on my cold ones. It wasn’t a kiss so much as an experimental applying of pressure. Her tongue pried where my lips met. I sank fast. I opened my mouth and fell down a whirlpool to the centre of the earth.

I won’t write another word. This memory I intend to keep.

The words above, what I’ve written until now, I have just finished transcribing by pencil onto paper from my mobile. My hand is aching and cramped. I haven’t held a writing tool for so long the activity feels only distantly familiar, like snapping Lego pieces together.

When I began this document the only action for “writing” I could imagine was voicing words into my mobile. My words were transcribed on screen and I saved each entry to a cloudfile named Allen’s Oblivion. But two days ago I came home from work and sat and stared at my mobile. My mind writhed with memories and thoughts but my lips were sealed shut.

I fed the goldfish and watched for a while, following the flounce of their long, feathery, pale tangerine fins as they moved.

I poured myself a drink. I needed a brain cushion. I saw my Beretta in the cupboard beside the bottle and had the thought Get the bullets , and that triggered the thought, Is this going to be a suicide entry? I missed my old strategy — I missed it intensely, the shrunken life, the banal pleasures of the everyday, the routine, oh the routine, but Ruby’s presence in my life has slammed that door good and tight.

I sat for hours mutely watching my fish, suppressing the bullet-finding urge, and wracking my brain— Why can’t I write? Writing, what is writing? A man voices memories alone in a room. Without a witness the act has no reality. The man could be doing anything. Writing needs a reader. I had to find a way to publish the entries. But where, where could a person publish words these days? I don’t know what the situation will be in the future, but at present bandwidth usage is severely limited and individual access is staggered. News is text only, films are watched at cinemas. Everyone’s mobile number has a cloud storage quotient that cannot be exceeded.

Every pie quadrant of OneWorld has a Citizen’s News site, but my entries weren’t news. A site called “Global Graffiti” was recently launched, a kind of trial balloon established by OneWorld where people can post messages of up to 500 words for twenty-four hours on language walls, comments activated.

I poured another depth charge and went to my armchair. I wanted a minimum number of readers so I posted my voicings under the obscure title “Mnemectomy,” and drank until I passed out.

When I got home after work the next day, my graffiti had attracted comments. They were mostly the usual money scams, urgent pleas for funds, offers of sexual services or testosterone boosters, but one was from a fellow vet.

Me too brother. Can’t shake the memories. Let me know how the writing thing works out for you. It does seem like a long shot I gotta be honest but if it’s any good I’d like to try it myself. Don’t know how much longer I can hang on. Your talking worms really sketched me out.

I used to be an altruist, but not any more. When I read that comment, I wanted to smash my mobile screen. I deleted the post immediately. I’m not looking for a conversation. I don’t want anyone else inside my head. No readers! No audience!

I pressed my forehead against the coolbox and wept because nothing had changed. My lips still did not move, and my voice remained silent. Memories pounded against the inside of my skull, increasing in violence, claustrophobic, maniacal, explosive. Against such potent antagonists, my strategy seemed silly, far-fetched, a thin, improbable thread to hang survival on. Desperate as a fish out of water, suffocating, frantically needing a solution, I had the thought— reread your original salvation. I used more rations, searched through my download of Marjan Rohani’s article, and found a glimmer of hope in the lines immediately following what I’d read before: “Plato describes Socrates as claiming that writing is inhuman in that it places outside the mind what can only in reality be in the mind. It turns living thoughts into something inanimate. It reifies, and turns inner processes into manufactured things.”

Could that be the flaw in my process? Did the act of writing have to produce a physical object, a piece of paper, a book, something that, if I died, would continue beyond me? Voicing only created digitized codes reliant both on a continuous flow of electricity and an information storage system.

Paper and pen. They haven’t been around since the late ’30s. Trees are no longer cut down, recycled cellulose became too degraded to use, and all farmed plant matter is used for food. With no paper there’s been no need to produce writing implements. I hurried to my bedroom and pulled out the suitcase where I keep a few mementos. Inside were two journals and a box of twenty pencils.

After my mother died, when my brother Leo and I were searching for her will, we found two old blank journals in the bottom drawer of her desk with a box of fresh pencils. We never found a will and because my mother died just as the die-off was peaking, Leo and I agreed to leave her possessions as they were for the time being and each just take one thing. I was in bad shape then, as bad as now, so I just took the first thing I thought of — the journals and the pencils. Leo annoyed me by taking a long time to choose, rifling through everything before eventually settling on our father’s hunting knife.

The journals are black, soft-covered, bound with two staples. The first page of one of them had a paragraph of writing, my mother’s writing:

Today I am seventy-eight. I have been blessed with a good life but I am afraid for the future, for my sons and for my grandchildren. Perhaps nothing really matters in the end, but I desperately want them to survive. If they die too then truly nothing will be left of me. I was born January 31, 1955, ten years after the end of World War II, and it looks like I will die before World War III ends, if that’s what people are going to call this. I’m alone. My husband died two years ago and my sons and daughters-in-law do their duty but not more. None of us have the energy.

I read with the warm rasp of my mother’s voice resonating through me, and the abrupt absence of any further words was deafening. I grinned, but it was not a grin accompanied by any feeling of pleasure. Rather it was the kind of grin that’s meant to ward off a threat or recognize a threat disguised as something else.