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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