The Mercy Journals (4 page)

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.

March 17 |

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.

I tore out the page, folded it, and tucked it in the back.

Her journal will be the container, the object, external to me in which I enter what is anguished and exterminating. By giving the memories that threaten me existence outside myself, I hope to degrade their presence inside me and pry loose their death grip on my mind. Once I finish writing this document and close the cover of this journal, my story will be sealed inside, until perhaps an unknown reader in the future, with cool detachment, opens its faded black cover and reads:
My name is Allen Levy Quincy. Age 58. Born May 6, 1989.

That is the only reader I can write for.

March 22 |

You might be thinking that Ruby was a bit on the easy side, promiscuous even. Definitely not fussy. Such thoughts crossed my mind too, especially the not fussy part, but as far as desire for her was concerned, those thoughts crossed the room and just kept right on going out the door.

She was a force field.

Having sex with her was like colliding with a meteorite.

The closest comparison I can make is to a fight where afterward, the only thing left is a whirlwind of impressions of violence: bone underneath flesh, something striking your jaw, the feeling of striving against gravity and, at the end, you stand up and you’re still alive and time winks and goes back to normal. You know you’re probably hurt, but you can’t feel it yet; you’re not sure how badly your opponent is hurt or even if the fight is really over.

I surfaced the next morning, red lipstick on my face and tangled sheets the only proof I had that I hadn’t dreamt the whole thing. A flurry of images and sensations came at me—red mouth, green rods in her brown eyes, long dark hair against my cadaver skin, an open mouth laughing, startling in its lack of missing teeth, breasts dense, small, and close to the chest, muscular haunch, and in the middle, myself, dizzy but closing in at every turn, the synesthesia caused by my vertigo making everything smell of the sea and fresh dirt.

It was six a.m. when I stepped out the door, exultant and clear-headed. The streets were empty, the fog thick. When there’s no wind, the fog usually hangs around all day except for maybe a couple of hours in the afternoon when it lifts
to mere cloud. On the rare occasions when the sun comes out, people rush to wash their clothes and hang them out to dry. In spring, farmers check their watches and count the hours to see when they need to roll the tarps back over seedlings and less hardy crops so they don’t burn. Birds and insects take cover. Nature becomes still until the cloud cover rolls back in.

I walked down the street, stump and foot, stump and foot, throwing my peg leg out in front of me like a land paddle, cooked oats and tea warming the inside of my ribs. Over the years I’ve come to like the new rhythm of my gait, the syncopated double beat, the rubber thud of my real foot followed on the off-beat by the higher-pitched shuffle-pad of the prosthesis in its shoe. I picked a simple prosthesis, a single-axis, constant-friction model with an adjustable cell that prevents the shank from swinging forward too fast. I’ve never regretted it.

I felt exultant, yes, light-footed and bouncy, yes, but also like a man who had been picked out of a herd and savaged. Far behind my happiness, in the dark shadows at the farthest back of backstage, was a whisper of alarm. I ignored the whisper and focused on how the morning light changed gradually from dark slate to pearl, and the sky’s weight changed from a blanket of darkness to a basement ceiling of wet stone to swirling white mist. The dark green leaves of vines on buildings threw no shadows in the grey light.

I walked through the old Chinatown below the viaduct where the majority of buildings are abandoned. The ones
that are inhabited are packed with people. Pink or yellow insulation cannibalized from empty houses has been tacked up inside windows and doors and stapled to ceilings to keep in the warmth. The neighbourhood looks like a gang of twelve-year-olds swept through and turned everything into a backyard fort. I made my way along the broken sidewalk that I have to take now that the viaduct has been condemned. I miss walking high above the city, mountains and ocean to the left, sky surrounding my head.

Still, on the route under the viaduct I get to see street art, which is miraculously appearing again. I passed a painting I particularly like of a giant, bald, putty-coloured man peeping over a stone wall. One of his eyes, which are emerald green, had broken off, exposing the rusty rebar beneath. I found the missing chunk and leaned it against the wall, so one eye looked up at the other.

As usual, I arrived at the Civic Security Station at 6:45 a.m. Velma looked up from the desk, bundled in two sweaters and a scarf, her dyed red hair done up stiff as a pine tree, her skin white and pouchy and covered in a flesh-toned powder that made the tiny hairs on her face unmistakable. She frowned. The changes in the world have left her irritable, and she probably won’t cheer up before she dies. She wants to blame somebody for encouraging her to believe that the old world was real in some absolute, permanent way. She’d been pacing herself for life in that reality and says she has no interest in making adjustments to this new one. She feels ripped off, like someone should pay, but has no idea who so she’s always on the lookout.

I myself was done with the old world.

Done.

My old house had abutted the freeway, which was how Jennifer and I could afford to buy off the base. We could taste the exhaust. Every night sixteen lanes of drivers sat in their cars, waiting to get where they were going. Taillights and headlights, strings of them, extending out of sight—drivers impatient to get out of the city, drivers impatient to get in. Everyone knew, on some level, that it couldn’t go on. The sheer numbers of us precluded it. I was planning to move my family up to Mom’s cabin. I’d laid in a rifle, ammunition, seeds, canned food, water purification kits, loads of matches, a generator. The key would be knowing when to leave the city for good. The Green Planet Brigade started to bomb roads. In retrospect, I see that would have been the time to leave, but you never leave with the first big crisis, because you think it might be a one-off and there’s all the other noise on the bandwidth—the promise of quantum computing, of physicists harnessing the energy of the geospace vacuum, nuclear fission plants, etc., etc. Then the next crisis hits, and you’re already invested in riding it out. You’ve already adapted to the new pattern. Anyway, Jennifer and I were glad the Green Planet Brigade was doing what they were doing. We thought it might be the beginning of something good.