Andrea Dworkin - Mercy

can; not just on principle, as in, give as little o f anything as you

can; but you give as little o f yourself as you can in a literal

sense, not as an abstract concept o f self but as little o f your

mouth as you can; except for the one who rammed it down to

the bottom, into your chest or your lungs or however far he

got, he shattered muscles as if they was glass, splintered them

as i f they was bone, you could feel a smashed larynx

swim m ing in blood, like a dead animal, all bleeding and cut

open, I got a sexy voice now, something hoarse and missing,

an absence, a bare vibration; but he w asn’t a trick, he was a

cute boy, true love and real romance, remember him I instruct

m yself because it’s hard, rape’s hard, remem bering’s hard,

they have to break so much there’s no deep deep enough to

bury it in, they leave you with crushed bones, diced nerves,

live nerves, sliced nerves as if someone took a knife to the

nerve endings themselves, not so they are cut dead but so they

are being sliced each minute o f forever, and they don’t go

dead, there’s not half a second o f numbness or paralysis, the

nerves are open and alive and being hit by the air, exposed, and

the knife is cutting into them thread by thread, they’re stringy

and the knife’s pulling them apart, and you got an acute pain

and a loud scream, high decibels, ringing in your ears, a

torture ringing in your ears, and it don’t let you sleep and you

don’t get forgetfulness, your eyes cry blood and you got open

sores, the lips o f your labia get boils, big boils; you got a

vagina with long, deep tears, an ass that rips open with blood

every time you shit, because it’s the penis again, oversized,

pulling out after haying torn its w ay in; and then you will

remember rape; these are the elements o f m em ory, constant,

true, and perpetual pain\ and otherwise you will forget— we are

a legion o f zombies— because it burns out a piece o f your

brain, it’s the scorched earth policy for the sweetmeat in your

head, the rape recipe, braise, sear, burn bare, there’s a sudden

conflagration on the surface o f your brain, a piece o f one

hemisphere or the other is burned bare, blank, and you lose

w hatever’s there; ju st gone; whatever; so rape’s a tw o-

pronged attack, on your body, in you, on your brain, in you;

on freedom, on memory; you might as well bury yourself in

the backyard, or throw yourself in a trash can, you’re like

some dumb cat or dog that got hit by a car, run over and died;

only they let the shells o f dead girls walk around because hell it

makes no difference to them if what they stick it in is living or

dead; w hat’s left, darling, is fine, according to the formula, a

girl frail and female, a skeleton with a fleshy pudendum, ready

to serve, these girls are ghosts, did you see, did you notice,

where are they, w hy ain’t they here, present, on earth, why

can’t you find them even if you look for them in the light, how

come they don’t know anything or do anything, how come

they ain’t anything, how come they are shaking and flitting

around and apologizing and begging and afraid and drugged

and stupid even if they are smart; how come they are comatose

even when they’re awake? He pushes it in, she pushes it out, a

dead spot in the brain marks the spot, there’s a teeny little

cemetery in her brain, lots o f torched spots, suttee; we bleed

both ends, literal, little strokes every time there’s a rape, time

gone, hours or days or weeks, words gone, self gone, memory

wiped out, severely impaired; I cannot remember— how do

you exist ? The skills, the tricks; tie your shoes; wrap ropes

around your heart, or was it your wrists; or was it ankles;

neck; I’d make a list if I could remember; I’d memorize the list

i f someone else would write it down; or I try, I scribble big

letters, confused, misspelled, on the page; or I look at the

words, meaningless, and draw a blank; I make a list,

misspelled words signifying I don’t remember what; or I draw

a picture, I use crayons, o f what? I try to say what I try to

remember; the skills, the tricks, language, yesterday. There

are little rape strokes, erased places in the brain, eruptions o f

blood, explosions, like geysers, it’s flooded, places on the

brain, blood’s acidic, did you ever sit in a pool o f your own

blood, it wears the skin o ff you, chafes, irritates, the skin peels

off; so too in the brain, the skin peels off; I’ve been there, a

poor, dear, quiet thing, naked like a baby, in a river o f blood,

mine, curled up; fetal, as if m y mama took me back. There’s

wounds and you sit in the blood. Why can’t I remember? I am

a stroke victim, a shadow in the night, invisible in the night, a

ghostly thing, in the night, amnesiac, wandering, in the night,

not out to whore, just what’s left, the remains, on the stroll;

taking a walk, pastoral, romantic, an innocent walk, lost in

memories, lost in fog, lost in dark; having forgotten; but I got

muscles packed with memory; hard, thick, solid, from the

positions reenacted, down on m y knees, down on m y back; I

got memories packed in m y bones, because m y brain don’t

make distinctions no more; can’t tell him from him from him;

I have an intuitive dread; o f him and him and him; there’s a

heightened anxiety; I’m a nervous girl, Victorian nerves,

strain, a delicate constitution in the sense that m y brain is frail,

pale; but m y muscles is packed, it’s adrenaline, from fear;

there’s a counterproductive side to creating too much fear, it’s

a meta-amphetamine, it’s meta-speed, it’s meta-coke, it’s

more testosterone than thou, I got a body packed with rage,

you ever seen rage all stored up like a treasure in the body o f a

woman? I don’t need no full capacity brain, as you so

eloquently have insisted; I got sunstrokes in my head, enough

daylight to carry me through any darkness, I am lit up from

inside, a bursting sun; brain light. I am a citizen o f the night,

on a stroll, no dark places keep secrets from me, I am drawn to

them by a secret radiance, the light that emanates from the

human heart, some poor bum, a poor man, poor fucking

drunk somewhere in the shadows hiding his poor drunk heart

in the dark, but I find him, I see the pure light o f his pure heart,

I find him, some asshole, a vagrant, clutching his bottle, and I

like them big, I like them hairy, their skin’s red and bulbous,