MERCY
by Andrea Dworkin
Copyright © 1990, 1991 by Andrea Dworkin.
All
rights reserved.
Excerpt from Chapter Four
In February 1965 (Age 18)
If you try to say some words it is likely people don't understand them anyway.
I don't think people in houses understand anything about the word cold. I
don't think they understand the word wet. I don't think you could explain
cold to them but if you did other words would push it out of their minds in a
minute. That's what they use words for, to bury things. People learn long
words to show off but if you can't say what cold is so people understand what
use is more syllables? I could never explain anything and I was empty inside
where the words go but it was an emptiness that caused vertigo, I fought
against it and tried to keep standing upright. I never knew what to call most
things but things I knew, cold or wet, didn't mean much. You could say you
were cold and people nodded or smiled. Cold. I tremble with fear
when I hear it. They know what it means on the surface and how to use it in
a sentence but they don't know what it is, don't care, couldn't remember if
you told them. They'd forget it in a minute. Cold. Or rape. You could never
find out what it was from one of them or say it to mean anything or to be
anything. You could never say it so it was true. You could never say it to
someone so they would help you or make anything better or even help you a
little or try to help you. You could never say it, not so it was anything. People
laughed or said something dirty. Or if you said someone did it you were just a
liar straight out; or it was you, dirty animal, who pulled them on you to hurt
you. Or if you said you were it, raped, were it, which you never could say, but
if you said it, then they put shame on you and never looked at you again. I
think so. And it was just an awful word anyway, some awful word. I didn't
know what it meant either or what it was, not really, not like cold; but it was
worse than cold, I knew that. It was being trapped in night, frozen stuck in it,
not the nights people who live in houses sleep through but the nights people
who live on the streets stay awake through, those nights, the long nights with
every second ticking like a time bomb and your heart hears it. It was night,
the long night, and despair and being abandoned by all humankind, alone on
an empty planet, colder than cold, alive and frozen in despair, alone on earth
with no one, no words and no one and nothing; cold to frozen but cursed by
being alive and nowhere near dead; stuck frozen in nowhere; no one with no
words; alone in the vagabond's night, not the burgher's; in night, trapped
alive in it, in despair, abandoned, colder than cold, frozen alive, right there,
freeze flash, forever and never let loose; the sun had died so the night and the
cold would never end. God won't let you loose from it though. You don't get
to die. Instead you have to stay alive and raped but it doesn't exist even
though God made it to begin with or it couldn't happen and He saw it too but
He is gone now that it's over and you're left there no matter where you go or
how much time passes even if you get old or how much you forget even if
you burn holes in your brain. You stay smashed right there like a fly
splattered over a screen, swatted; but it doesn't exist so you can't think about
it because it isn't there and didn't happen and couldn't happen and is only an
awful word and isn't even a word that anyone can say and it isn't ever true;
so you are splattered up against a night that will go on forever except nothing
happened, it will go on forever and it isn't anything in any way at all. It don't
matter anyway and I can't remember things anyway, all sorts of things get
lost, I can't remember most of what happened to me from day to day and I
don't know names for it anyway to say or who to say it to and I live in a
silence I carry that's bigger than my shadow or any dark falling over me, it's a
heavy thing on my back and over my head and it pours out over me down to
the ground. Words aren't so easy anymore or they never were and it was a lie
that they seemed so.
Go to NEXT CHAPTER: "In October
1973 (Age 27)"
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CONTENTS
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