The Mercy Journals (6 page)

You don’t know me, do you?

I stopped and turned back. Something about you seems familiar. There’s something about your voice.

I’m your brother, asshole.

I looked into the burning eyes I’d been avoiding. How could I not have seen it? True, I wasn’t looking for connection with the outside world, even less with a cheater, but I should have known him, even after twenty years, even with the hair and the beard.

I suppose that means I have to keep you? I said.

March 23 |

I let Leo have my shower that night. Then I fed him. Then I’d had enough of him. He complained that there was no booze in the place. I wrapped a sheet around a pile of my clothes for a mattress, gave him the seat cushion from the easy chair for a pillow and my army blanket to supplement his coat and retreated to my bedroom.

I wanted to be rid of him. It was Ruby I wanted to find and bring back to my apartment, not my brother. I had worked seventeen years with pure discipline to tamp down my past, and now here was this hairy, smelly, demanding emanation threatening my hard-won equilibrium because he had nowhere else to go?

But as I folded my clothes and put them away, threaded my way into my pyjamas, turned out the light, and lay on my back waiting for warmth, I remembered how I used to crawl into Leo’s bed after a nightmare even though I was the older brother, and he’d pat my head with his smaller hand and we’d look out the window at the chestnut tree as I whispered my nightmare to him, and he’d say, Don’t worry. Hamschen (our dead pet hamster) is watching over us, and we’d start to giggle and drift back to sleep together. I remembered that he always used to ask me to feel his muscles, and they were just tendon and bone, like a frog’s quad grafted onto a humerus, and he’d be looking at me with unguarded hope. When my own boys were that age and they did the same thing, I’d feel their walnut-sized biceps, knowing they wanted serious acknowledgement, but all I had was affection and the memory of Leo underneath.

Sometime in the middle of that night, with Leo sleeping in the living room, I sat up and was flooded by memories of my old life. I missed Jennifer so much. I think I’d been reliving in my sleep the last time we’d had sex, and I kept trying to wind the dream back the way you used to rewind a
DVD
by jumping back a chunk, watching a bit of the beginning of the previous scene, then jumping back to the beginning of the chunk before. I was making love with her, and then the dream would leap back to making love when the kids were little, then to when Jennifer was pregnant, then to before we had kids when I returned from a tour in Afghanistan and the sexual excitement was explosive, so to speak, but the dream kept sliding back to the last time we’d made love and somehow Ruby was there but invisible.

I’d come home from Mexico, before the final collapse of the United States of North America, my last tour of duty, and we only managed to get back because we’d carried all the fuel for the return journey with us on the buses when we deployed. I was going through the motions of being a father to the boys—picking them up, swinging them round—but I was numb inside. Everyone in the military knew about
PTSD
by then, but somehow I figured my life had to have been threatened for me to have it. Jennifer and I made love that first night I came back, and I managed to hide what was going on inside my head, but after that I always begged off tired.

A year later, I took her out for a romantic dinner at one of the few restaurants still running in all the chaos and talked obsessively about the Mexican landscape, the cacti, the
rodents and birds and insects. It was her birthday. She asked if I was all right, and I said I was. We drove home through a windstorm, paid the sitter, went upstairs. I kissed her, felt nothing, led her to bed and undressed her, felt nothing, which was, ironically enough, agony. I managed a fragile erection—my penis must have managed to have its own memory—and I entered Jennifer as quickly as I could before the whip cracked and horrible images stormed my mind.

My erection faded almost immediately. Jennifer tried to get me going. It was unbearable watching her from a thousand miles away. I put my hand on her head and whispered, stop. She rolled onto her back and looked at the ceiling, not breathing and then taking in the lightest wisp of air through her nose. I have never seen a human so alive yet so still.

What about me? she asked eventually. Then looked to the wall away from me. Is this ever going to end?

It’s not that I don’t want you. I actually suggested that they’d put too much potash or whatever in the bagged meals, and that maybe it would wear off. I put my arms around her, pulled her against me, and tried to console her, but it was like holding a giant bagged meal. She stuck with me for another year.

Stop,
I ordered myself. Starlight from the window revealed the faint mass of the furniture in my bedroom in front of me.
No reminiscing.
A sudden snore-gasp came from Leo in the living room. I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling, taking in the lightest wisp of air through my nose.

In the morning, Leo groaned himself awake from the floor as I made tea. He seemed to expect me to serve his
tea to him, which I did. When I last saw Leo, his business was starting to tank but he was still wealthy. Our mother’s funeral. Funeral is not the right word. The state was collapsing around us and formal annexation had done nothing to slow it. Hers was one of the last cremations. We intended to scatter her ashes at the cabin with Dad’s, but we couldn’t get the gas to make the trip north.

Nice apartment, he said, leaning on an elbow and looking around.

Don’t get any ideas.

You’ve taken neat to a whole new fucking level.

As you have slob.

He took a sip of his tea. Why did you come to Seattle anyway?

I brought the boys here after Jennifer died. We all needed a change of scene, and I thought Mom’s relatives could help with the boys while I looked for work.

You never called. You never wrote. He mimicked a complaining mother.

Never did. I got out the fish food. Never called the rellies either. I fed the fish.

I didn’t want to give him an opening, but I threw caution to the wind and asked what had happened to him since I last saw him.

Leo had always lived faster than anyone I knew. In grade six he sold fireworks; in high school he sold dope. He invested his earnings in stocks before he finished grade twelve. At university, while barely scraping through a degree in accountancy, he put together a stock deal that made millions. He
moved to Seattle and invested in real estate. By age twenty, he had a yellow Corvette and partied hard six nights out of seven. A woman was sexually assaulted at a party at his place, but no charges were laid. Even when we knew for sure what was coming with climate change, even when everyone did, he was of the school that still wanted to take the planet out for one last, hard spin before trying to fix it. He was a let’s-have-fun-and-go-out-in-a-wild-beautiful-explosion kind of guy. His philosophy distilled down to, Nothing lasts forever.

And yet he always knew to the dollar bill what his net worth was and to the minute what time it was. He knew the exact number of kilometres his Corvette had logged, how much money friends owed him, how far he’d jogged in the past week, how many calories he’d eaten that day.

Daytime, he lived in a rapid-fire world of numbers, nighttime, in a euphoric, somewhat paranoid, substance-induced whirlwind. I didn’t see much of him after he moved to Seattle and Jennifer and I got married. He’d tried to get us to invest in a deal he was putting together, and tried to get our parents to as well, said we’d make a lot of money, and when we said no, he amped up the pressure. He went behind my back and tried to get Jennifer on board. When I confronted him he weaselled out, saying,
I was only trying to help.
If we had invested, we would have lost our shirts. Leo would probably have bailed us out but then we would have been beholden. I did not want to be beholden. My mother told me that a man had come looking for Leo and asked her how Leo made his money. Shortly after that Leo met and
married Evie, an Australian working at a Tokyo chat bar. He got a job in a multinational life insurance company developing actuarial models for insurance against catastrophic weather events. He copyrighted his work and started his own business. Within five years, he was able to reveal that he was very, very rich. Evie and he had two girls as well as her son Griffin from a previous relationship.

Leo was unlucky in his parents. Our father, who adored the quasi-communal life of the army, might have accepted Leo’s wealth if he’d kept it hidden, but he didn’t know how to love a son who flaunted it, and our mother the high school English teacher was a socialist at heart. Leo was not someone I would have ever known if he wasn’t my brother, but I always felt connected.

He put his empty teacup on the floor, sat up, wrapped the blanket around his shoulders, and leaned against the wall. He spoke loud enough I could hear him over the noise of stirring the porridge I was making for our breakfast.

I managed to take out enough cash for Evie and me and the girls before the shit really started hitting the fucking fan. Buried it in a safe in the garden. We moved our beds into the kitchen and only heated that room. I had no work to go to, so I hung around the house all day driving Evie nuts. She got me digging up the lawn so she could put in some vegetables. She made me teach the girls how to read and do math. One day she told me to take some cash and see if I could buy some live chickens. I ended up walking way too far—I was blown away by the changes in the city, you know what it was like—I just kept walking and didn’t get
back that night. I slept in a garden shed somewhere, woke up hungry, and ate some wormy apples. I went around knocking on the doors of houses where I smelled chickenshit, but no one wanted to trade the birds for cash. I slept out a second night and before dawn stole three chicks from one of the houses I’d visited.

I got depressed and just sat around watching Evie and the girls do all the work. She started giving me less and less food when she divvied up the dinner. I started to wander the city and sleep out more often, until finally I never went back.

The car you ticketed was stolen. I wanted to come and find you. I want to go to the cabin together. I’ve come to the end of myself.

I put in supplies for Jennifer, me, and the kids. Maybe they’re still there.

Come with me, Allen. You’ve got nothing going on here. We’ll take Mom’s ashes up together. Maybe your boys will be there. We can fish and kill deer.

The deer population is depleted, and the island cougars, who are already the most aggressive on the continent, are starving. There are hardly any fish left. And what about vegetables, scurvy and such?

You always were a negative Nancy.

Transportation?

I can get us kayaks.

I laughed. I got dressed for work and handed him the apartment key. I held it in my hand over his palm—This is only for one day. Don’t touch anything other than the fridge.

I was cold and hungry after work that night. I wondered where Leo had our mother’s ashes, thinking I must ask him. The wind blew so hard it seemed it would strip the new buds off the trees, and the clouds were so thick that dusk was dark as night. I had to use my Callebaut.

No one knows how long these new flashlights are going to last, but they’re definitely outlasting their owners. They were invented by a guy called Enstice Callebaut who discovered a way to isolate microscopic particles of nuclear waste, encase them safely, and convert them to light. Callebaut instantly became a hero and is honoured once a year on Guardians of the Future Day. A lesser star was the woman who found a way to wrangle wire coat hangers into devices to suspend the light from the headboards of beds, thereby expanding its radius and preserving the integrity of books’ spines.

The flashlight gives off a cool, narrow line of illumination that has no glow. You have to point the beam directly in someone’s face to make out their features, and no one wants that, so all we see of each other at night is our feet, unless the moon is out.

I fretted about what to feed Leo and decided to take him to the community dining hall.

When I opened my apartment door, Leo was sprawled in my armchair, using my mobile’s precious daily charge. He wagged his index finger at me.

You’ve broken the rules, Allen. He nodded at the goldfish.

Mr Pure and Noble. Mr Saviour. Mr Enforcer. Mr Fucking Good of Mankind. I’m going to have to turn you in. I’m telling Mom.

Pets were outlawed in 2033 when it was deemed immoral to keep animals for pleasure while people starved and undomesticated species disappeared forever. I’d bought cartons of fish food, plastic bins to store it in, replacement tank lights, and filters. I’d found a black market supplier to replace fish at the cost of one week’s pay. In their small, contained world, I could take care of them and do no harm. I could experience a sliver of love and appreciate their beauty—an easy pleasure, a tiny responsibility, a miniscule infraction. A life could only shrink so small without disappearing. I’d needed those fish to survive.

I flushed with annoyance. Get off my mobile.

Where’d you get them? He put my mobile down with elaborate care on the side table. Hunt’s Point? Medina? South Tacoma? Capitalism creeping in on the margins, eh?

Why are you using my mobile when I told you not to touch anything?

Allen, my brother, take a load off. Let me get you a drink.

I don’t drink anymore.

No shit. Wishful thinking. A cup of tea then?

I sat down in my easy chair, and he spoke to me like the master of my own kitchen.

I’m sorry about the mobile, but I was so fucking bored and I didn’t feel like reading
War and Peace.
He made air quotes. I mean, where did you get such singularly uninteresting books? That takes a special talent.

I owned three unreturned library books:
War and Peace, Brecht: A Biography,
and
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.
There were four books from our parents’ library:
Bad Dirt, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, Learn French the Fast and Fun Way, Weekend Woodworking with Power Tools
—
18 Quick and Easy Projects,
and two of my sons’ old classics,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
and
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.