Mercy Is The House of God

Jay Strickland thought he would be more terrified than this if he were ever in a blizzard. There was snow back home in Lassador, and maybe you could even call it a blizzard, but a blizzard in the city was not like a blizzard in North Dakota where neighbors were two miles away and they were neighbors you didn’t know anyway. He had never known the world was so big until taking a bus out here. He knew in his head and from logic—but how far did logic ever go?—and from films that the world was big and that this land was big, but it was not until he was under what people called “big sky”, that he understood.

The sky back home was big. All sky was big if you looked at it, the sky on the train was big when it took him out of the city. But soon trees came in and towns came in and the sights of the world below obscured the view above. For hours and hours there had been nothing, and coming here there had been nothing. And this was the first time, as he stood in the prairie, outside of the house, that he could see the weather being made, as by the hand of God, and the weather spreading itself out.

But now the weather had come and terror didn’t come with it. Anger did not come either. All of those feelings that in a smaller world arrived had no place in this very big moment. Something like hope was here, and Jay knew the only reason it was present was because he could not despair. There was no room for it.

“If I despaired I would have to despair of everything, and if I despaired of everything I would have to kill myself, and there’s nothing here to do it with.”

I could stand outside and let that snow do it.

In a place like this, the snow might end up doing it anyway. All this way from Lassador that wasn’t New York and wasn’t LA and wasn’t even Columbus, but was home and was a place where he did not expect to die. All this way to come to a place where he looked out the window and saw snow driving white and grey and finally absolutely dark past the windows, all this way to find Michael Cleveland.

He left me, and does that make me a fool that in response I came all this way to find him? When he left, I did not try to stop him. The last year had been hard. I woke up one morning and he was packing and he said, ‘This doesn’t work. I mean it doesn’t work for you. It works for me just fine.”

We were always of the same mind. I never had to say, “What do you mean?” He never had to explain himself.

“We could be like this forever,” Michael said. “You could be the nursemaid to my crazy. I won’t have it.”

I did not stop him. That would have only been pretense, or I would have been one of those people who needs the crazy, what they call codependents. And I wasn’t codependent. I wanted my healthy Michael, and I wanted the joy of our first years, before the turn had taken place and things had gotten harder and harder and he was right, I would have stayed forever, and so because I could not leave, he did.

“Where are you going?” I had asked him.

“To my Dad’s.”

“Michael,” I began and stopped myself.

“He stood there with shirts in his hand, waiting to put them in his suitcase.

“Your dad’s is no place to be crazy in. At least go be with your mom.”

Michael kept packing He said nothing. He filled two cases. He said, “Is it okay if I come back tomorrow for other stuff?”

“Michael, you can come back as much as you want to.”

It was funny how I never called him Mike or Mokey. He just was not that, the same way I was never James. Michael and Jay, Jay and Michael.

I opened the door for him and closed it after him with not so much as an embrace. An embrace would have been a hug. A hug would have been a kiss. A kiss would have been lovemaking. We would have put off what needed to happen for another day, and it needed to happen. We both knew it.

I was never a shouter, so I went to our room—my room now—and got the phone and called him. I looked out the window and saw him, beside his car, pick up the phone.

“Call when you’re at your mom’s.”

“She’s only a half hour—” he stopped. “Okay. I will.”

What I remember and what seems important to tell is that Michael kept paying rent. I feel like I had to let you know that. Like I have to stand up for him. We got this house together and I had no plans of losing it. Even though he wasn’t there, his money was. But by then I was used to paying. In the last year he was sporadically employed and after he was gone, he was far more dependable that when he was here.

Dependable. I don’t even want to say that because I did not depend on Michael Cleveland. I loved him, and that’s something different. After he was gone, I was still seeing him once or twice a week, and there was air in my life and I hated to say that because it was like I had been suffocating before, and well, I imagine I was. Terrified, terrified for Michael and what he would do to himself. Terrified that I would wake up and he wouldn’t’ be there. The first few nights I had those dreams over again and I woke up, and was in a mild terror because he indeed was not there. And then I remembered why he was gone, that he was across town with his mother, that there was no reason for him to be here, and I felt lighter waking up without him, I felt… light.

Three months after he had left, we were at lunch, and Michael said, “I’m going back to Morelton.”

Morelton was the institution he’d been in when we were teenagers.

“I’m going to get my head screwed on right. I need to get my head screwed back on.”

I didn’t say anything for a while and then I said, “Michael, I don’t think it’s like that. I don’t think you can just get fixed.”

“I know that,” he said gently, touching my head, “but I feel like my head’s gotten a little wobbly in the last few years, and I can get it reattached, straightened every now and again.”

And then he said, “Do you love me?”

“What a question?”

“I mean, do you love me? Because if you do you’ll understand I didn’t want to leave. I want to be sane again so that we can be together again.”

We had been best friends. We had grown up together. Michael had been my lover for seven years. I was twenty-five at the time. I knew I shouldn’t want someone to build their life around me.

I told him, “That can’t be your only reason. There’s got to be another reason.”

Michael looked away from me and he frowned. He drummed his fingertips on the table between us and then he said, “No, Jay, that’s really my only reason. I’d like to be mature and creative and say that I had a lot going on in my life, but I just want to be sane so we can get back together.”

Oh, Michael the wind is howling and the house almost feels like it’s shaking. This is what nature feels like. I want to say something about God, something about feeling unprotected something about all of the ideas of safety not making since here, something about how this wild and windy country with no protection and the full force of all that is blowing against this house must be like what your mind is, what I have felt sometimes, what the whole world is feeling. The whole world is frightened and crazy, and doesn’t want to crack, and that’s why when someone really does crack, they point their fingers, they distance themselves. They shake their heads. They say poor thing, poor weak thing. But I am weak here, I leave the living room. There isn’t anywhere I can hide from this storm.

Michael, I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t looking for you, if I didn’t hear you tell me that you loved me and the only reason you wanted to get better was to come back to me. It made it so that I could drop everything and come to find you. Early on, both of us saw the same thing in the world, that it wasn’t worth what people said it was, that everything offered wasn’t that much worth having, and then we picked up a stone and we turned the stone over and there were the worms and bugs underneath, glistening, shining, writhing with a hundred legs. We found beauty under the stones, and people like that can be romantics, people who are driven mad can, at last, let themselves be mad enough to love, so I can drop everything and come running to you and waiting for you in all this blinding whiteness.