Mercy (54 page)

a lot o f pride to lie. I wanted; what did I want? I wanted:

freedom. So they are ripping me apart and I smile I say I have

freedom. Freedom is semen all over you and some kinky

bruises, a lot o f men in you and the certainty o f more, there’s

always more; freedom and abundance— m y cup ran over.

There’s a special freedom for girls; it doesn’t get written down

in constitutions; there’s this freedom where they use you how

they want and you say
I am, I choose
,
I decide
,
I want
— after or

before, when you ’re young or when you’re a hundred— it’s

the liturgy o f the free woman— I choose, I decide, I want, I

am— and you have to be a devout follower o f the faith, a

fanatic o f freedom, to be able to say the words and remember

the acts at the same time; devout. Y ou really have to love

freedom, darling; be a little Buddha girl, no I, free from the

chain o f being because you are empty inside, no ego, Freud

couldn’t even find you under a microscope. It’s a cold night,

one o f them unusual ones in N ew Y ork, under zero with a

piercing wind about fifteen miles an hour. There’s no coat

warm enough. I lived in someone’s room, slept on the floor. It

was Christmas and she said to meet her at M acy’s. I followed

the directions she gave me and went to the right floor. I never

saw anything so big or so much. There’s hundreds o f kinds o f

sausages all wrapped up and millions o f different boxes o f

cookies all wrapped up and bottles o f vinegar and kinds o f oil

and millions o f things; I couldn’t get used to it and I got dizzy

and upset and I ran out. I lived with the woman who helped

me when I was just a kid out o f jail— she still had the same

apartment and she fed me but I couldn’t sleep in m y old room,

her husband slept in it now, a new husband, so I slept on a sofa

in the room right outside the kitchen and there were no doors.

There was the old sofa, foam rubber covered with plaid cloth,

and books, and the door to the apartment was a few feet away.

When you came in you could turn right or left. I f you turned

left you went to the bathroom or the living room. The living

room had a big double bed in it where she slept, m y friend. If

you turned right you came to the small room that was the

husband’s and past that you came to the open space where I

slept and you came to the kitchen. The husband didn’t like me

being there but he didn’t come home enough for it to matter.

He was hard and nasty and arrogant but politically he was a

pacifist. He looked like a bum but he was rich. He ordered

everyone around and wrote poems. He was an anarchist. M y

old room had to stay empty for him, even though he had his

own apartment, or studio as he called it, and never told her

when he was showing up. A friend o f hers gave me a room for

a few months in a brownstone on West 14th Street— pretty

place, civilized, Italian neighborhood, old, with Greenwich

Village charm. The room belonged to some man in a mental

institution in Massachusetts. It was a nutty room all right.

T w o rooms really. The first w asn’t wider than both your arms

outstretched. There was a cot, a hot plate, a tiny toilet, a teeny

tiny table that tipped over i f you put too much on it. The

second was bigger and had windows but he filled it up so there

wasn’t any room left at all: a baby grand piano and

humongous plants taller than me, as tall as some trees, with

great wide thick leaves stretched out in the air. It was pure

menace, especially how the plants seemed to stretch out over

everything at night. They got bigger and they seemed to

move. Y ou could believe they were coming toward you and

sometimes you had to check. The difference between people

who have something and me is in how long a night is. I have

listened to every beat o f m y heart waiting for a night to end; I

have heard every second tick on by; I’ve heard the long pauses

between the seconds, enough time to die in, and I’ve waited,

barely able to breathe, for them to end. D aylight’s safer. The

big brown bugs disappear; they only come out at night and at

night yo u ’re always afraid they’ll be there so you can’t help but

see them, you don’t really always know whether they’re real

or not, you see them in your mind or out o f the corner o f your

eye, yo u ’re always afraid they’ll be there so if you see one slip

past the corner o f your eye in the dark you will start waiting in

fear for morning, for the light, because it chases them away

and you can’t; nothing you can do will. Same for burglars;

same for the ones who come in to get you; daylight; you wait

for daylight; you sit in the night, you light up the room with

phony light, it’s fake and dim and there’s never enough, the

glare only underlines the menace, you can see you’re beseiged

but there’s not enough light to vaporize the danger, make it

dissolve, the way sunlight does when finally it comes. Y ou can

sleep for a minute or two, or maybe twenty. Y ou don’t want

to be out any longer than that. You don’t get undressed. Y ou

stay dressed always, all the time, your boots on and a knife

right near you or in your hand. Y ou get boots with metal

reinforced tips, no matter what. Y ou don’t get under the

covers. Y ou don’t do all those silly things— milk and cookies,

Johnny Carson, now I lay me down to sleep. Y ou sit

absolutely still or lie down rigid and ready for attack and you

listen to the night m oving over the earth and you understand

that you are buried alive in it and by the grace o f random luck

you will be alive in the morning— or w on’t be— you will die or

you w on ’t and you wait to find out, you wait for the light and

when it comes you know you made it. Y ou hear things break

outside— windows, you can hear sheets o f glass collapsing, or

windows being broke on a smaller scale, or bottles dashed on

cement, thrown hard, or trash cans emptied out and hurled

against a cement wall, or you hear yelling, a man’s voice,

threat, a wom an’s voice, pain, or you hear screams, and you

hear sirens, there are explosions, maybe they are gun shots,

maybe not— and you hope it’s not coming after you or too

near you but you don’t know and so you wait, you just wait,

through every second o f the night, you wait for the night to

end. I spend the change I can find on cigarettes and orange

juice. I think as long as I am drinking orange juice I am

healthy. I think orange juice is the key to life. I drink a quart at

a time. It has all these millions o f vitamins. I like vodka in my

orange juice but I can’t get it; only a drink at a time from a man

here and there, but then I leave out the orange juice because I