Mercy

walls and I don’t think you could turn that into a story per se or

even a novel o f ideas that people would grasp as philosophicaclass="underline"

for instance, that you can just sit and they provide a

fram ework o f dignity because no one’s watching and I have

had too many see too much, they see you when they do things

to you that you don’t want, they look, and the problem is

there’s no walls keeping you sacred; nor that if you stand up

they are solid which makes you seem real too, a real figure in a

room with real walls, a touchstone o f authenticity, a standard

for real existence, you are real or you feel real, you don’t have

to touch them to feel real, you just have to be able to touch

them. M y pacifist friend gave me money to live here. She saw

me on the street one day, I guess, after I didn’t go back to her

apartment no more. She said come with me and she got a

newspaper and she found an apartment and she called the

landlord and she put the money in m y hand and she sent me to

the landlord which scared me because I never met one before, a

real one, but also she wasn’t going to let the cash go elsewhere

which there was a fair chance it would, because I would have

liked some coke or something or some dinner or some drinks

and a m ovie and a book or something more real than being

inside which seemed impossible— it seemed not really available and it seemed impossible to sustain so it made more sense

to me to use the cash for something real that I knew I could get,

something I knew how to use. I started sending her money

back as soon as I got some, I’d put some in an envelope and

mail it back even if it was just five dollars but she said I was

stupid because she only said it was a loan but it w asn’t and I

didn’t need to pay it back and everyone knew that which is my

weakness, how everyone got to know things but I don’t know

them. I can’t think o f any stories about pacifists that aren’t

true. There’s nothing imaginary about walls, or eating,

nothing fictive as it were, but more especially there’s nothing

imaginary about them when they’re missing. M y walls are

thin; yeah I wish they were mine. N othing’s yours. God hurts

you if you think they’re yours. In one second o f a bad thought

you can bring evil down on you. The walls are thin. I dream

there’s holes in them and I get scared as if it’s not really inside.

There’s not much food and I know it ain’t mine in any

meaningful sense. Y o u ’re supposed to make things up, not

just write down true things, or sincere things, or some things

that happened. M y mother who you can’t make up either

because there’s nothing so real as one named me Andrea as if I

was someone: distinct, in particular. She made a fiction. I’m

her book, a made-up story written down on a birth certificate.

Y ou could also say she’s a liar on such a deep level she should

be shot by all that’s fair; deep justice. if I was famous and my

name was published all over the world, in Italy and in Israel

and in Africa and in India, on continents and subcontinents, in

deserts, in ancient cities, it would still be cunt to every fucking

asshole drunk on every street in the world; and to them that’s

not drunk too, the sober ones who say it to you like they’re

calling a dog: fetch, cunt. if I won the Nobel Prize and walked

to the corner for milk it would still be cunt. And when you got

someone inside you who is loving you it’s still cunt and the

ones w ho’d die i f they wasn’t in you, you, you in particular, at

least that night, at least then, that time, that place, to them it’s

still cunt and they whisper it up close and chill the blood that’s

burning in you; and if you love them it’s still cunt and you can

love them so strong you’d die for them and it’s still cunt; and

your heartbeat and his heartbeat can be the same heartbeat and

it’s still cunt. It’s behind your back and it’s to your face; the

ones you know, the ones you don’t. It’s like as i f nigger was a

term o f intimate endearment, not just used in lynching and

insult but whispered in lovemaking, the truth under the truth,

the name under the name, love’s name for you and it’s the

same as what hate calls you; he’s in you whispering nigger. It’s

thugs, it’s citizens, it’s cops, it’s strangers, it’s the ones you

want and the ones you deplore, you ain’t allowed indifference,

you have to decide on a relationship then and there on the spot

because each one that passes pisses on you to let you know he’s

there. There’s some few you made love with and yo u ’re still

breathing tight with them, you can still feel their muscles

swelling through their skin and bearing down on you and you

can still feel their weight on you, an urgent concentration o f

blood and bone, hot muscle, spread over you, the burden o f it

sinking into you, a stone cliff into a wet shore, and yo u ’re still

tangled up in them, good judgm ent aside, and it’s physical, it’s

a physical m em ory, in the body, not just in the brain, barely in

the brain at all, you got their sweat on you as part o f your

sweat and their smell’s part o f your smell and you have an ache

for them that’s deep and gnawing and hurtful in more than

your heart and you still feel as if it’s real and current, now: how

his body moves against you in convulsions that are awesome

like mountains m oving, slow, burdensome, big, and how you

m ove against him as i f you could m ove through him, he’s the

ocean, yo u ’re the tide, and it’s still cunt, he says cunt. H e’s

indelibly in you and you don’t want redemption so much as

you want him and still it’s cunt. It’s w hat’s true; Andrea’s the

lie. It’s a lie we got to tell, Jane and Judith and Ellen and

whom ever. It’s our most desperate lie. M y mother named me

Andrea. It means manhood or courage. It means not-cunt. She

specifically said: not-cunt. This one ain’t cunt, she declared,

after blood spilled and there was the pain o f labor so intense

that God couldn’t live through it and w ouldn’t which is w hy

all the pain’s with us and still she brought herself to a point o f

concentration and she said: not-cunt. This one’s someone, she

probably had in mind; a wish; a hope; let her, let her,

something. Something. Let her something. D on ’t, not with

this one. Just let this one through. Just don’t do it to this one.

She wrote: not-cunt, a fiction, and it failed, and the failure

defeated her and turned her cold to me, because before I was

even ten some man had wrote “ this one’s cunt, ” he took his