Mercy (44 page)

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

w ouldn’t get him the tea and I tried to convey to my husband

that m y hospitality was being abused,
our
hospitality, o f

course, that I wasn’t being treated fair, not that some rule was

being broke but that the boy was being rude to me; I told my

husband to clean it up finally but he never did it too good. I

told m y husband who I still thought was m y brother that I

didn’t want the junkie to come anymore because he didn’t

treat me in an honorable w ay and I said I wasn’t born for this.

So there were these fissures coming between us because the

fraternal affection was with him and the junkie from the old

days together, not him and me from now, and I was shocked

by this, I couldn’t grasp it. I went into the rooms with him but

it came down on him how bad it was from the men and it came

down on me that I wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near

where they were. I kept going to the rooms because we kept

hitting targets all over the city and w e’d need to get o ff the

streets fast and he’d know some place he wanted to be, one

friend or another, and they’d all be there; it would contradict

the plan but he’d say it was necessary. Some were on the run

for recent crimes but most were burned out, living in times

past, not fighting no more, most stopped long ago and far

away and they were just burned out to hell. Yeah, they were

tired, I respected that; I mean, I fucking loved these heroes; I

knew they were tired, tired from living on their nerves, from

hiding, from jail, from smoke, from fucking, which came first

for some but last for others. Some had children they had

deserted; some lived in the past, remembering stray girls in

cities they were passing through. They were older than me but

not by a lot. I wanted their respect. I hadn’t given up and I did

anything anybody else did and I wasn’t afraid o f nothing so

how come it was like I wasn’t there? I mean, I was too

honorable to be anything other than strong and silent, I tell

you; but I thought silence made its own sound, you count on

revolutionaries to hear the silence, otherwise how can the

oppressed count on them? Every lunatic was someone we

knew that we dropped in on or stayed with while we were

running— or m oving just for the sake o f speed, the fun o f

flight. We went to other cities, hitchhiking; we lived in small

rented rooms, slept on floors. We went to other countries—

we begged, we borrowed, yeah, we stole, me more than him,

stealing’s easy, I been stealing all m y life, not a routine or some

fixed act, just here and there as needed, from stores when I was

a kid, when I was hungry or when there was something I

wanted real bad that I couldn’t have because it cost money I

didn’t have— I never minded putting money out if I had it in

m y pocket— I mean, I remember taking a chocolate Easter egg

when I was a kid or m y proudest, most treasured acquisition, a