Andrea Dworkin - Mercy

to each other and we embraced each other and we were going

to hole up together, kind o f a home, us against them, I guess,

and we didn’t have no money or ideas , you know , pictures in

your head from magazines about how things should be—

plates, detergents, how them crazy wom en smile in advertisements. It’s all around you but you don’t pick it up unless you got some time and money and neither o f us had ever

been a citizen in that sense. We were revolutionaries, not

consumers— not little boy-girl dolls all polished and smiling

with little tea sets playing house. We were us, unto ourselves.

We found a small place without any floor at all, you had to

walk on the beams, and he built the floor so the landlord let us

stay there. We planned the political acts there, the chaos we

delivered to the status quo, the acts o f disruption, rebellion.

We hid out there, kept low , kept out o f sight; you turn where

you are into a friendly darkness that hides you. We embraced

there, a carnal embrace— after an action or during the long

weeks o f planning or in the interstices where we drenched

ourselves in hashish and opium until a paralysis overtook us

and the smoke stopped all the time. I liked that; how

everything slowed down; and I liked fucking after a strike, a

proper climax to the real act— I liked how everything got fast

and urgent; fast, hard, life or death; I liked bed then, after,

when we was drenched in perspiration from what came

before; I liked revolution as foreplay; I liked how it made you

supersensitive so the hairs on your skin were standing up and

hurt before you touched them, could feel a breeze a mile away,

it hurt, there was this reddish pain, a soreness parallel to your

skin before anything touched you; I liked how you was tired

before you began, a fatigue that came because the danger was

over, a strained, taut fatigue, an ache from discipline and

attentiveness and from the imposition o f a superhuman

quietness on the body; I liked it. I liked it when the embrace

was quiet like the strike itself, a subterranean quiet, disciplined, with exposed nerve endings that hurt but you don’t say

nothing. Then you sleep. Then you fuck more; hardy; rowdy;

long; slow; now side by side or with me on top and then side

by side; I liked to be on top and I moved real slow, real

deliberate, using every muscle in me, so I could feel him

hurting— you know that melancholy ache inside that deepens

into a frisson o f pain? — and I could tease every bone in his

body until it was ready to break open, split and the m arrow ’d

spread like semen. I could split him open inside and he never

had enough. I had an appetite for him; anything, I’d do

anything, hours or days. In my mind, I wasn’t there for him so

much as I was the same as him. I could feel every muscle in his

body as if it were mine and I’d taunt each muscle, I’d make it

bend and ache and stretch and tear, I’d pull it slow, I’d make it

m ove toward me so much it w ould’ve come through his skin

except I’d make him come before his skin’d burst open. I didn’t

have no shyness around him and I didn’t have to act ignorant

or stupid because he wasn’t that kind o f man who wanted you

to overlay everything with the words o f a fool like you don’t

know nothing. Some was perverse according to how these

things are seen but that’s a concept, not a fact, it’s a concept

over people’s eyes so much you wish they would go blind to

get rid o f the concept once and for all. It’s how the law makes

you see things but we were different. We were inside each

other; a fact; wasn’t perverse; couldn’t be. We turned each

other inside out and it binds you and there w asn’t nothing he

did to me that I didn’t do to him and w e’d talk and cook and

roam around and drink and smoke and w e’d visit his friends,

which wasn’t always so good because to them I was this

something, I didn’t understand it but I hated it, I was this

something that came into a room and changed everything.

There were these guys, mostly fighters, anarchists, some

intellectuals, and when I came into the room everything was

different. I was his blood and that’s how we acted, not giggly

or amorous, but I think I was just this monstrous thing, this

girlfriend or wife, that is completely different from them and

cannot talk without making them mad or crazy, that cannot

do anything but ju st must sit quiet, that does not have any

reason to be in the room at all, not this room where they are,

only some other room somewhere else to be fucked, sort o f

kept like a pet animal and the man goes there when he’s done

with the real stuff, the real talk, the real politics, the real w ork,

the real getting high, even the real fucking— they go somewhere together and get women together to do the real

fucking, they hunt down women together or buy wom en

together or pick up women together to do the real fucking;

and then in some one room somewhere hidden aw ay is the

w ife or girlfriend and she’s in this sort o f vacuum, sealed

aw ay, vacuum packed, and when she comes out to be

somewhere or to say something there is an embarrassment and

they avert their eyes— the man failed because she’s outside—

she got out— like his pee’s showing on his pants. We’d go to

these meetings late at night. These guys would be there; they

were famous revolutionaries, famous to their time and place,

criminals according to the law; brilliant, shrewd, tough guys,

detached, with formal politeness to me. One was a junkie, a

flamboyant junkie with long, silken, rolling brown curls,

great pools o f sadness in his moist eyes, small and elegant, a

beauty, soft-spoken, always nodding out or so sick and

wretched that he’d be throwing up a few times a night and

they’d expect me to clean it up and I w ouldn’t, I’d just sit there

waiting for the next thing we were all going to discuss, and

someone would eventually look me in the eye, a rare event,

and say meaningfully, “ he just threw u p , ” and time would

pass and I’d wait and eventually someone would start talking

about something; I didn’t get how the junkie was more real

than me or how his vomit was mine, you know. When the

junkie’d come to where we lived he would vom it and sort o f

challenge me to leave it there, as he had fouled m y very own

nest, and he’d ask for a cup o f tea and I’d clean it up but I