Mercy

whichever is his pleasure that day, it’s what you wanted, what

you are, what’s inside o f you, like you planned it all along, like

yo u ’re General Westmoreland or something instead o f messed

up, bleeding trash, and i f yo u ’re running aw ay they send you

back for more, and they don’t give you money to help you,

and they tell you that you like it; fucking middle-class

hypocrite farts. I have a list. I remember you ones. Y o u try to

pull the w ool over someone else’s eyes about how smart you

are and what humanitarians you all are on the side o f

w hoever’s hurting. Nelson Mandela provoked it. What do

you think about that, assholes? We all o f us got the consolation

that nobody remembers the worst things. T h ey’re gone; brain

just burns them away. And there’s no words for the worst

things so ain’t no one going to tell you the worst things; they

can’t. Y ou can pick up any book and know for sure the worst

things ain’t in it. It’s almost funny reading Holocaust literature. The person’s trying so hard to be calm and rational, controlled, clear, not to exaggerate, never to exaggerate, to

remember ordinary details so that the story will have a

narrative line that will make sense to you; you— whoever the

fuck you are. The person’s trying so hard to create a twenty-

four-hour day. The person picks words carefully, sculpts

them into paragraphs, selects details, the victim ’s selection,

selects details and tries to make them credible— selects from

what can be remembered, because no one remembers the

worst. They don’t dare scream at you. They are so polite, so

quiet, so civil, to make it a story you can read. I am telling you,

you have never read the worst. It has never been uttered by

anyone ever. Not the Russians, not the Jew s; never, not ever.

Y ou get numb, you forget, you don’t believe it even when it’s

happening to you, your mind caves in, just collapses, for a

minute or a day or a week or a year until the worst is over, the

center caves in, whoever you were leaves, just leaves; if you

try to force your mind to remember it leaves, just fucking

empties out o f you, it might as well be a puddle on the ground.

Anything I can say isn’t the worst; I don’t remember the

worst. It’s the only thing God did right in everything I seen on

earth: made the mind like scorched earth. The mind shows

you mercy. Freud didn’t understand mercy. The mind gets

blank and bare. There’s nothing there. Y ou got what you

remember and what you don’t and the very great thing is that

you can’t remember almost anything compared to what

happened day in and day out. Y ou can count how many days

there were but it is a long stretch o f nothing in your mind;

there is nothing; there are blazing episodes o f horror in a great

stretch o f nothing. Y ou thank God for the nothing. Y ou get

on your fucking knees. We are doing some construction in our

apartment and we had a pile o f wood beams piled up and he

got so mad at me— for what? — something about a locked

door; I didn’t lock the door or he didn’t lock the door and I

asked him w hy not— and he picked up one o f the w ood beams

and he beat me with it across m y legs like he was a trained

torturer and knew how to do it, between the knees and the

ankle, not busting the knees, not smashing the ankles, he ju st

hammered it down on m y legs, and I don’t remember

anything before or after, I don’t know what month it was or

what year; but I know it was worse, the before and the after

were worse; the weeks I can’t remember were worse; I

remember where it happened, every detail, we had the bed in

the hall near the w ood beams and we were sleeping there

temporarily and it was early on because it w asn’t the brass bed

yet, it was ju st a dum py old bed, an old mattress, and

everything was dull and brown, there was a hall closet, and

there was a toilet at one end o f the hall and a foyer leading to

the entrance to the apartment at the other end o f the hall, and

there wasn’t much room, and it was brow n and small and had

a feeling o f being enclosed and I know I was sitting on the bed

when he began to hit me with the beam, when he hit me with it

the first time, it was so fast or I didn’t expect it because I didn’t

believe it was possible, I didn’t understand what happened, or

how it could; but I remember it and the only thing that means

is that it isn’t the worst. I know how to calibrate torture— how

to measure what’s worse, what’s better, w hat’s more, w hat’s

less. Y o u take the great morbid dark blank days and you have

located the worst. Y ou pray it ain’t buried like Freud says; you

pray God burned it out like I say. Some weeks later he wanted

to have dinner with his sister and brother-in-law. I could limp

with a great deal o f pain. I was wearing dark glasses because

m y eyes had cuts all around them and were discolored from

bruises and swollen out o f shape; I don’t know when m y eyes

got that way; the time o f the wood beam or in the weeks I can’t

remember after; but I had to wear the glasses so no one would

see m y eyes. Them kinds o f bruises don’t heal fast like in the

movies. They all played cards and we had cheese fondue

which I never saw before. I walked with a bad limp, I

concealed the pain as best I could, I wore the dark glasses, I had

a smile pasted on my face from ear-to-ear, an indelible smile,

and brother-in-law brought up the limp and I said smiling

with utter charm that I had tripped over the beams and hurt

myself. D on’t w orry, I whispered urgently to m y husband, I

would never tell. I would never tell. What you did (hoping he

doesn’t hear the accusation in saying he did it, but he does o f

course and he bristles). I’m on your side. I wouldn’t tell.

Brother-in-law, a man o f the world, smiles. He knows that a

lot o f stupid women keep falling down mountains. H e’s a

major in the military; we say a fascist. He knew. He seemed to

like it; he flushed, a warm, sexy flush; he liked it that I lied and

smiled. There’s no what happened next. Nightmares don’t

have a linear logic with narrative development, each detail

expanding the expressive dimensions o f the text. Terror ain’t

esthetic. It don’t work itself out in perfect details picked by an

elegant intelligence and organized so a voyeur can follow it. It

smothers and you don’t get no air. It’s oceanic and you drown,

you are trapped underneath and you ain’t going to surface and

you ain’t going to swim and you ain’t dead yet. It destroys and

you cease to exist while your body endures anyway to be hurt

more and your mind, the ineffable, bleeds inside your head