The Mercy Journals (12 page)

April 5 |

When I found Ruby again I didn’t want to appear as desperate as I was, but deception has never been my strong point. My only strategy therefore was to be direct and honest. I went over to the university and bought a ticket for her performance. It was closing night, which gave me a chill. I’d almost lost her. After the performance I waited outside her dressing room. When she opened the door, I pulled off my toque and began to sing a Nirvana song my first babysitter introduced me to, “Come as You Are.” I leaned in close and sang in a whisper, starting with the instrumental part.

I stopped at the song’s bridge, thinking that swearing you don’t have a gun wouldn’t hit the emotional note I was aiming for. I told her I had registered my sons on the missing persons website. I told her I missed her. And then I said, I have something to tell you, something I’ve never told anyone, something it might destroy me to tell. I think it’s the only way forward. She cocked her head and raised an eyebrow.

I was hurtling into space strapped to a bucket seat. We got to my apartment and I led her to bed and undressed her, my heart exploding. We made love twice and I let out a holler, an indefinable sound. She laughed. I fed her. She fell asleep and I dozed.

I woke up a couple of hours before sunrise. I put on my leg and my bathrobe and stole quietly out to the kitchen. I put my overcoat on over my bathrobe to keep warm, poured some cold tea, and sat in my chair looking out the window at the blackness. I began to make out the shapes of clouds moving across the sky, then the blooms of a magnolia across
the street started to glow through their net. A cyclist floated by, the beam of his Callebaut projecting a thin line of light from the handlebars.

In a way, everything in my life before now seemed to have had the purpose of bringing me to this moment with the intention of speaking. And having arrived at this moment, there was no way back. My old strategy was in ruins. Ruby, with her prodigious appetite and big stride, had woken me up and going back to sleep was not an option. Everything seemed volatile and impermanent.

I thought: maybe I have another ten years to live, maybe twenty. I want her in them if possible. I thought: time could be a large airy room we inhabit together. She would never abide being cornered and we both had wounds that wouldn’t heal, wounds that required privacy, yet I thought in a big enough space we could love each other.

Speaking now was the only way forward yet the risks were chittering and hissing and fluttering in the air around me.

I thought about the smallest particle of matter, the Higgs boson that Ruby had mentioned, changing from the force of being looked at.

Eventually a guttural, exhaling growl of pleasure, the kind people make when they stretch, came from my bedroom. I put the kettle on and brought my beloved a hot cup of tea. She had one arm above her head and held that hand with the other and pulled, stretching the side of her body. I put the tea on the floor beside the bed, sat down, and rested a hand on her leg, which was under the covers.

From my seat in the dark theatre I had seen a crowd pass through her: orphan, refugee, seductress, gatherer, pregnant mother, madwoman, oracle, huntress. She was a childless mother, a gypsy, and an artist who knew the world, yet no one knew her. I wanted to be the man who knew her. I felt the pulse in her leg under my hand. I felt her, but I did not know her, not in the way I’d known Jennifer. In the old days I would never have loved Ruby; she would have been too unfamiliar, too unpredictable.

She sipped her tea and looked at me. It felt like we were in a space capsule.

Sitting on my bed with my hand on her leg I believed it could work. I could tell her and we would live happily ever after, safe on the platform of my bed, two bodies making love and bringing home food and news until we grew old and died. The best ending a human can hope for.

I lay down beside her and started to talk at the ceiling. I moved into hyper-clarity, tracing the tiny valleys and peaks of the stucco’s texture. I can summon the exact shade of grey made by the light coming through my window on the dark side of each knobble of plaster.

She lay on her side looking at me, her hands tucked under her face, satisfied, relaxed, full.
That
was a miracle. I jumped off the cliff and began.

Two years before the die-off peaked, my battalion was deployed to a camp in the desert to guard the border wall between Mexico and the North. The main conflict, you’ll remember, was in the Arctic Circle, keeping the Russians and Norwegians out, but we were sent south. The Mexicans were
blowing holes in the wall because they desperately needed water. When we arrived the breaches had been filled with barbed-wire coils and at night the place was lit up like a movie set. We heard stuff like this was going on along the length of the entire wall. On the second night the wind began to blow. Even with masks on, we breathed in the dust. It was like being on Mars. I didn’t think anything could survive out there in the dark without masks, without water.

Tumbleweeds would get caught in the wire coils, then the wind would shift and the weeds would be blown back into the dark or come straight at us and make us jump. One night, sometime before dawn, three
RPGS
went off and a couple of our guys got hit by fragmentation. The flash from the launcher showed as a brief glow on the other side of the wall but in all that dust you couldn’t see smoke trails to pinpoint the origin. The tumbleweeds started really freaking everyone out. You’d be peering into the brown haze lit by the spotlights and this round ball would catapult out of nowhere into your face. I put my weapon down and tried to karate chop the suckers before they touched me. I remember the feel of dried sticks roiling off the side of my hand and some of the twigs blowing into my face. And I remember the dust. And the brown haze. And the dust from the new holes in the wall that we couldn’t see until we got lights on them, but sensed as a darker patch in the haze.

Ruby rolled onto her back and joined me staring at the ceiling. I took a few shallow breaths and continued.

By the time we shipped out three months later to go back home we were just lucky there was enough fuel for the buses.
We had to carry all the fuel for the journey back with us. As we entered the base my sons must’ve heard the buses because they came racing into the clearing area. They flew at me when I stepped out of the door. I placed my hand on their shaggy heads and looked for Jennifer.

The heat of their skulls radiated through their damp hair and I was filled with revulsion. For three months all I’d wanted was to return home to them and now I jerked my hand away and covered my behaviour by getting the boys to look for my bag and challenging them to carry it all the way home.

As I spoke I was hyper-aware of Ruby’s breathing. We weren’t touching. Out of the blue a desire for a drink hit me hard and I had to stop talking and wait for it to pass. Ruby’s breathing was as steady as a metronome.

The boys took turns carrying my bag. Sam dragged it more than carried it back to the house. I don’t know why Jennifer didn’t come out to the buses. She must’ve known it was our battalion. My parents, who’d moved back onto the base when the troubles started, hurried over. Jennifer stood holding the door open for the boys to drag my bag in, and my parents hovered behind her. My mom didn’t look good. She was thin and pale and hunched over.

I got to the foot of the steps and hesitated. I didn’t want to pass over the doorsill. I looked down at the ground. I noticed the blades of grass, some green, some yellow, and clover and buttercups. A line of ants beside the path was running bits of leaf. I noticed them meet head on and sort out their impulses, go left or go right, two choices, a binary decision. I started to
cry. Jennifer ran down the stairs to hug me and I held up my arm—No—my first word back.

I did eventually walk into the house. No one wanted to upset me, so they hung back, waiting for a sign. I went to the bathroom and locked the door. They must’ve heard the weird gasping sounds I made trying to sob silently. After a while, my dad came to the door and spoke. I wasn’t sobbing out of grief. It was just a way to let off pressure. I wasn’t feeling anything except that I didn’t want them to know how numb I was. I opened the bathroom door and announced, I’m going to the den to play some video games.

I started drinking heavily and playing on-line games all day. The army shrink told my family that it was post-traumatic stress disorder. It was, but it was also more than that. My whole understanding of the world had changed. My father took me out for a beer. I drank four to his one. Five to his one. Son, he said. Tell me what happened. I’m ashamed to say that I went on the attack. I belittled his service. I belittled him for never having killed.

Ruby clasped her hands below her breasts above the blankets. She lay like a painting of drowned Ophelia—hair spread out—very pale, as people in excellent physical condition sometimes are after extreme exertion. I couldn’t tell for sure if she was listening.

My father reached across the table and grasped my forearm in his strong, dry hand. My leg was going like a pneumatic drill. I was trembling and sweating and glancing wildly all over the place. I searched his face with the faint hope that he might have something to offer, some wisdom or
knowledge, but there was nothing. All I saw was helplessness and love. He loved me. He really loved me.

I told him I had to go and downed my glass and fled before I hurt him any more. It was the last time I saw him healthy. He died two weeks later of the influenza.

I paused in my telling just as I’ve paused now, in my writing. Breathed. Breathed in. Then jumped headlong.

On our second night the Mexicans blew another hole in the wall. Amid the swirling smoke and dust lit up by our floodlights a man walked out of the darkness and stood in the new breach. He was covered in dust and his face was shadowed by a hat, a cloth hat with a wide soft brim, like a gardener’s hat. We couldn’t see his face but we felt him looking at us. No one moved. We waited. Then he moved his hand very slightly and people began to stream out of the darkness behind him and walk past him through the new hole.

They were silent. In all that wind and dust, with all the orders being shouted and guys yelling, you could hear that they were silent. Our orders were to shoot anyone breaching the wall. The floodlights exposed them: women, children, old people, sons, daughters—expressionless, focused only on getting through and disappearing into the darkness on our side. When we saw it was civilians I ordered my company to fire warning shots, but the people didn’t even slow down. I was getting orders on my headset to stop the motherfuckers and I was yelling back that it was kids and women and old people.
Stop them, I don’t care how, but stop them. No one crosses.
I called out a warning in English and again in Spanish but they didn’t even look up. I shouted an order to my men to use non-lethal
force. Our first shots were to legs and feet, and a whimper went through the crowd, but people just lifted the wounded under their arms and carried them forward. Someone must have told them not to run, not to panic, not to scream, that their only hope was to just keep walking forward. Other units were firing at other breaches along the wall and we heard a C6 and an FN Mag open fire. I prayed for the crowd to turn back. I shut my eyes and pleaded with the universe to turn them back, but of course it didn’t. They needed a drink of water. They needed food. They poured through, heading for darkness while the man with the hat stood looking at us.

The major on the other end of my headset demanded to know what was wrong.
Stop them, or I’ll stop you.

I wish I could tell you I said, Go ahead, stop me.

I flipped the switch. I wish I could say it was my training that kicked in, but it wasn’t. I felt rage. Rage that I was in that position, and rage that my men were. There was anguish and pain and horror, but on top of that, there was rage, and it coalesced into one thought—make this stop, shut this down. End it. We took out the man with the hat first. All night they kept coming, as if they thought we might run out of bullets. They had to climb over bodies to keep coming. When I say bodies, you think dead bodies, but many of our shots were not fatal. Our earlier kindness in shooting to injure we soon regretted. During a pause in the exodus, as we stood with our guns pointing toward the heap of bodies, we heard moaning and crying and muffled wailing and groaning. Children crying Mama, Mama, Papa, and women, mothers calling Eduardo, Anna, Maria, Carlos. Men calling for their
wives, their children, sisters and brothers, friends. No one crying for themselves.

It was like a massive birthing gone wrong. Bodies covered with sweat and blood and tears, hair glued to heads like a newborn’s, flesh blue and white, glistening and streaked with darker blood.

I asked for permission to terminate the wounded. The major was gentle with me now: We don’t know how bad this thing is going to get. I know it’s hard, Quincy, but you need to save bullets for the ones coming over.

I thought of going to take a piss and then just keeping on walking, but unless I took my men with me, I wasn’t leaving.

My soul—and the souls of many of my men—leached out that night. I could feel it coming out of me; there was a sensation to it, like blood leaking from the heart, electricity from the brain. Damage that you know is permanent as it is being inflicted.

The morning after, it rained. My lieutenant put his 9mm in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I remember him bending over the muzzle of his lowered weapon and opening his mouth and I thought, Odd time for a sexual joke.

All those people wanted was a simple drink of water, and here it came, for free. I think we would have killed God, or whoever it was that set the world up this way, right then. The rainwater ran off the bodies, washing their blood away. I looked down at my friend, in chunks from the neck up. Anyone walking through the hole that morning I let pass. There weren’t many. An American commander drove up, saw what was going on, and said something like, If you let
them in, Americans are going to die. They would shoot us if the situation were reversed, in a heartbeat. Are you fucking soldiers or aren’t you? I almost shot him just to shut him up.