The Mercy Journals Read online

  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-bea
t 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.

  When I was certain it was time to leave, I was on a bus headed south to the Mexican border, and Jennifer and the boys had moved back to the base. She had no way to reach the cabin by herself.

  A whisper of warning. No thinking about the past. I smacked myself in the head in the change room. Put my uniform on. Ruby’s presence had already, after only one night together, made a chink in my armour.

  Velma snapped her fingers in front of my face. Hey. Pretty boy. Here’s your scanner.

  Larry, who works in vehicle reclamation, came out of the can wearing his bright yellow jacket with reflector tape and our unit name, Transpo—Squad B. He looks like the bloodhound version of a human being—baggy flesh, enormous eyes, grey face. He doesn’t look well. Maybe heart disease, maybe cancer—the blood isn’t moving where it should, but you’d think he didn’t have a care in the world.

  Quincy. You’re looking kind of cheery. What happened, you get laid? Zipping up his fly.

  I couldn’t help grinning ear to ear.

  No way. Really?

  Just pulling one of your three legs, you over-privileged bastard, I said.

  Always with the gimp card.

  At least he’s got a card to play, Velma said.

  Well, Sunshine, Larry clapped his hands, we men have got work to do.

  Nail ‘em to the wall, boys.

  Don’t you love it when she calls us boys? I opened the door.

  Our shift starts early so we can catch overnighters and charge them double. It’s like hunting, but it’s only mice we’re after. My job is to walk past every vehicle parked within my territory once an hour and scan the licence plates. The scanner relays data to city hall, which tracks each plate hourly and bills the user. These days the hourly fee for parking is equal to the average person’s hourly wage. If a citizen fails to pay parking fees, the vehicle is ticketed and impounded, and their driving privileges are revoked for a month. After four infractions, the penalty is loss of driving privileges for three years.

  My job also includes ensuring the vehicles parked in my territory adhere to the latest regulations. When OneWorld came into being, most vehicles were Phevs, Bevs, or hybrids that used various combinations of hydrogen, solar, and electric batteries or fuel cells, with some gasoline or bio-diesel fuel, although some drivers still had luxury models with powerful engines run solely on fossil fuels. These models were banned immediately, but people got fuel on the black market and continued to drive them, either to circumvent charges to their ration cards or to avoid the limits to the speed or distance they could drive. A big part of parking enforcement in those days involved tagging and impounding these vehicles and disenfranchising the transgressors. That particular excitement has diminished over the years since most of the illegal vehicles have been impounded and OneWorld is transitioning to government-owned Shuvs. We still catch the occasional transgressor, though, someone who has installed an illegal engine in an approved body or attached a counterfeit licence plate to an illegal model.

  I like to keep my territory clean and orderly. I enjoy catching cheaters. I think of them as people who would steal food from a baby, people who would take my last breath of air without blinking.

  Between eight and nine a.m., the streets are full of people going to work, running errands, taking their kids to school. No one is in a hurry, and the city unfolds the way I imagine a medieval town would have—people greeting each other, picking up food, flirting, yawning, waking up as they go—colours faded, buildings ramshackle. Vehicle traffic is less with each passing year. Fewer people, more bicycles. The Canton laid off twenty percent of us in the last two years. I’m lucky to still have my job.

  I was making a final round before lunch when an unusual matte sheen on a vehicle caught my eye. I took my key out, got down on my good knee, stuck my prosthesis out to the side, and scratched the solar paint under the bumper. Sure enough, old paint showed through—robin’s egg blue. I went and rubbed the tailpipe with my thumb. The soot smelled acrid and metallic. I popped the hood. I don’t know how the guy that drove this thing got here without being swarmed because that engine would have sounded louder than any other vehicle around today. I quickly closed the hood and examined the edges of the licence plate. Counterfeit.

  I went to the stash box at the end of the block, unlocked it, got out a boot, came back, and clamped it on. Scanned the plate. The parking was paid. I sent in a tow request and moved down the street. I w
as about four or five cars down the road when I heard the boot being shaken and someone yell, What the fuck!

  I scanned the next plate without turning around.

  Hey! You! Did you put the boot on me?

  I didn’t respond.

  You. Asshole. Did you boot me? Am I a ghost? Did I fucking up and die and no one told me? This piece of shit life.

  The voice was getting closer.

  It struck me as familiar in a déjà vu kind of way. I turned and faced him. In these kinds of situations, the Krav Maga comes in handy. When I turned, he stopped. The guy was covered in hair—beard down to his armpits, greying hair down to his elbows. He had a dirty face, blue eyes burning at me. His clothes were dark and dusty, maybe black, maybe charcoal grey, maybe brown, but his shoes were polished and expensive. He must’ve kept some good pairs from the old days, and he’d recently oiled the leather.

  You’re driving an illegal model, sir. And you might want to keep your voice down. The public doesn’t take kindly to these types of infractions.

  Though the crises seem to be on the wane, people are still volatile. No doubt everything will be different in the future and, in any case, I don’t want to paint a picture of humanity gone to the dark side—it wasn’t like those old Hollywood movies about the future where everyone starts turning into killers and eating each other—mostly people help each other, pool their efforts, try to survive together, but there have been incidents where mobs suddenly coalesce and kill someone who they think is breaking the new environmental laws.

  I don’t agree with it. Obviously I believe that civil society is our only hope, yet I understand what drives the rage. People still remember when individual citizens were allowed to consume as much as they wanted as long as they could pay. People still remember the impotence of knowing that the environment we all depended on for survival was being destroyed by people wanting more—more money, more security, more control, more stuff—and we remember our own anxiety as we ourselves did things that contributed to our destruction. We remember when we realized that we relied for survival on a system that was killing us. It’s not like our fates aren’t all bound together. And everyone lost someone close in the die-off. So now, when someone breaks the new laws, people aren’t always reasonable.