Mercy Is The House of God

In the morning, while Dalton was in the shower, Jay called Kate she said, “I’m so glad to hear form you James. Have you heard from Michael?”

“No,” Jay said. “Not at all. Why?”

“Because none of us have. His father was the last to hear from him. Nine days ago. He was out in North Dakota. North Dakota! He said he felt really lost and then… nothing. Nobody’s able to reach him. Michael is missing.”

Michael

I don’t want to go on. I do not want to go on, and I do not mean this is some kind of suicidal way. What I mean is I, Michael Thomas Cleveland, do not want to move forward. I want to go back. I want to go back and back because there was a time when we were younger and life had more color in it. It hurt more, true enough, and maybe we were sadder, but the trees had a green to them they don’t have now, and the air had a heat and a wetness in it. All we had was each other. That was all we needed. It was enough. The world was big and black but endurable. Out of love with the heat of the day, we turned to the shade and learned to love the wet world of earth and pebbles. Unable to conceive of popularity or success in the world, we found beauty in something else.

I said, and I meant it, that my life would not revolve around you. That I would be better for myself, for my own goddamn sake, but that wasn’t true. I didn’t love myself enough for that. I still don’t. Myself was just the useless case I carried around because it enabled you to love me, And I loved you. I would have done anything for you. Until I couldn’t do anything. Until I couldn’t get out of this damn chair, Jay. And I did not revert. I did not go back to being crazy. Oh, no. I became something I had never been before. I became far more mad than I had ever been. When people say you’ve hit rock bottom, when people say there’s only up from here, they’re lying. Things can always go a little more downhill. The truth is, there is no end to south.

This is what madness looks like. It is always there, and always in the corner, and you wonder how long you will keep it at bay. Normal life. College happens. My first year as a teacher happens. It’s hard. It would have been better if I’d gone back to a Catholic school, but I told myself I’d never do that again. I imagine even there kids have problems. But here you see the children who come to school with no socks even in the winter, who don’t have coats because, even after you get them the coats their parents lose them or sell them. You smell the pot on them. You smell something like cat piss that you learn is meth. You check hair for lice and clothes for bedbugs. You do maintenance and hope you’ll do some teaching.

Jay never planned to be a teacher. He is on his way to grad school, but when I tell him about, it, rather than being one of those people who talks about how awful it must be or asks about my day, he signs up to become a school sub, so he’s in the schools a lot to see it all. The kids who sleep through class because they cannot sleep at home, the children who build weird houses from Legos, then tell you, “That’s a jail. It’s where my daddy lives.”

“It sounds terrible,” my mom says. “I don’t know how you do it every day.”

“It sounds terrible, but it feels good and I guess its like Jay says, “Someone has to do it.”

One day Mickey Avedon doesn’t come to class. After a few days I’m not the only person asking where he is, having Child Services go to the house. By the way the rules about how far the police can come into your house without a warrant, or Child Services are ridiculous. We count the days. This is not the first time that kids have disappeared or that you’ve wondered what the hell is going on. My first year we learned a Kindergartener was hit by a car on the west side and then that the kid went to our school, but no name was given, and you could see all the Kindergarten teachers huddled together on the playground murmuring to each other.

When the police finally go into Mickey Avedon’s house they find that my Mickey, my bright boy, is dead for two days in a puddle of congealed and dried blood. They find out, and I can type it quickly so I don’t have to think about it, that his dad wanted to beat him, but he thought that if he did it himself it was child abuse, and he would go to jail and so he made Mickey’s brother, a couple of years older, do it. More grisly stuff comes out. I can’t talk about it. We learn that his mother wanted custody, but this guy had better lawyers or something.

The day I hear that Mickey is dead, I literally stop seeing colors. Everything is black and white. The world gets slower and slower. It effects my hearing. I muddle on till the end of the week and then take the next two weeks off. At the end of the two weeks I quit teaching.

I go back to working at the grocery store full time. People don’t ask questions. It’s well known teachers have to make ends meet and not that many people asked about school anyway. People think depression is just sitting on a couch not moving or not being able to, move and it can be that too, but maybe because I didn’t want it to be that, for me it became working all the time , stacking, unboxing, boxing, checking out. Not coming home. Not being there. I wore myself out doing it until I couldn’t anymore. When I knew I couldn’t’ do it. U told my manager. Nicole knew I had a history.

“We’ll miss you,” she said, same as Principal Skinner. “Come back when you can.”

It’s not true that going over things and examining the past helps. Some times it makes everything worse. I had a therapist who kept telling me to go back over the trauma. But bitch, I don’t want to go back over the trauma. I don’t want to go over the not being able to get out of bed. I don’t want to go through not feeling things. I don’t want to go over how it’s almost worse to have someone who loves you because no matter what they say you feel like you’re letting them down. You know you’re not there for them. You know you’re not the person you want to be. The pills make you foggy, make you stupid. Being off of them makes you anxious.

I remember one day to get out of my head I crossed town and went to the university library. It’s a beautiful place and it was always where I kind of could count on losing myself. But it’s built so that the succeeding levels look down on the lobby like balconies, and then there is a winding stair case that goes up the five stories and connects like a bridge to each one. Thankfully it was mostly empty because of spring break. This day, on the top story, as I stared down from the bridge to the lobby below, and the saw the winding staircase I traveled down a thousand times before, I imagined them cracking and me tumbling with them to my death, smashed and covered in concrete slabs. who they could crack and fall down and I would tumble to my death. The world tilted. I couldn’t trust gravity or my feet. I closed my eyes tight, sick and dizzy and terrified and clutched the rail to get my balance. Lost in sickness and terror, I trembled and closed my eyes and couldn’t move for over a half hour.

When I finally made it home, jittering and in a panic, I stayed in a corner until Jay arrived. I hoped he wouldn’t get home soon because, as much as I wanted him to comfort me, I didn’t want him to see me like this. He’s seen me like this too many times and I’m tired of being crazy.

It’s two days later I start packing.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To my Dad’s.”

“Michael,” he said while I was packing, “your dad’s is no place to be crazy in. At least go be with your mom.”

I kept packing while I thought about this. It was easy to be left alone at my dad’s, which is why I chose it, easy to be in the dark and to my own devices and, Ja was right, not the place to be crazy.

I asked him, “Is it okay if I come back tomorrow for my other stuff?”

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

When I get tp my mom’s I call Jay.

“I love you,” I tell him.

He tells me.

“I know.”

2.

Jay’s will is tremendous. With someone else, leaving would not work. With someone else, after I had walked out the door I would ask to come back, or someone else would say, no don’t leave. They wouldn’t’ say, I know you’re right. They wouldn’t say do what you have to do. I’ve seen those relationships. Especially with men. Men are so needy. Someone so screwed up but they won’t leave, someone you’re in love with so toxic, but you won’t let them go. Two people who need to be alone but cannot be. Jay was never that way, and so he didn’t allow me to be that way.

It is over three months since I’ve left. Jay does not tell me he is sleeping with other people. But he does not really bother to hide it either. And it’s not really my business, so oddly enough, I’m not bothered. I don’t have any desire for anyone else but Jay and this is because I don’t really have any desire. I’ve been impotent forever, so it’s not like my love is more virtuous. We are at lunch for the first time, and I am actually wondering how it will be between us, but Jay is not like an ex anymore than he was like a proper boyfriend. He is what he always was, the other side of myself. And it isn’t even that we talk that much at lunch but we fit together and he passes the ketchup before I reach for it.

He doesn’t ask questions like, are you still at the grocery store, or how are your parents. He asks, “What time do you have to be at work?”

“Four thirty.”

Jay nods. “It’s one thirty now. You need to start driving at four. You never thought you should be early, but I disagree. We’ve almost got two hours.”

It doesn’t even occur to me to ask two hours for what. There is no coyness between us. We pay the bill and I drive us to Jay’s place that used to be my place. Without rushing or ceremony, almost like the very first time, we strip in front of each other. Jay touches me. He takes my sex in his hands and cradles it. He holds my penis and strokes the head like it’s the tenderest thing, and I’ve been impotent, not able to even think about making love but now as he touches me I feel myself getting harder and harder. I’m getting larger in his hands and I remember him telling me I was always thick, and I look to Jay’s face but his head is down, and tears are falling from between his lashes, just very silent rivers over his golden brown face that is silent like a mask and my vision is blurring and I feel my body seize up, and my eyes sting, and we don’t make any noise. We just stand in front of each other, tears falling, touching each other and then holding each other.

There is a carpet on the floor and today it feels like we melt together on it more than anything you’d call fucking. We don’t make noise and we just move like we’re one thing. And maybe sometimes we’re crying and maybe sometimes we’re doing something that’s almost laughing and this part of my body that’s been dead is just getting bigger and so much life is flowing into it and I’m giving it to Jay. He’s the only one I want to give it to and I can feel his hands on my back and in my hair and his arms are so strong and they’re holding me, and he pulls on my curls and whispers into my ear, “Come inside of me.”

I start crying and when I come it’s like my cock is an exploding star and light is firing out of me, firing out of both of us. There must be a long time when we lie still together before I move my hands along Jay’s body, the body I know as well as my own, and I make him come and I feel him raining over me, Jay’s semen is like that hot summer rain and I need it showering all over me. His mouth is open like he’s praying, and his face is streaked with tears and for a long time we are like this, then he folds down across me and we are huddled in each other. I wish there was no work at four. I wish I’d never left. I know that I need to go to work and that leaving was the best thing for both of us. But for now there is just this, just me and Jay on this carpet and then in the bed where we repeat this, quicker, faster, sweating, making use of the last of the stolen hours we have.

We lived together for seven years. For the last three we have lived apart. He has dated other people and I have had vague misadventures. It has never occurred to us, or at least it has never occurred to me, not to have sex. In all the years that I knew I was single and we were no longer a couple, whenever we go out to dinner, or attend one of our family gatherings or whatever it never occurs to me that we won’t go home together, and it never occurs to me that I won’t wake up with him. If we go to the movies and I have to be somewhere, it never occurs to me that either before the movie or after it we won’t not make love. We are no longer boyfriend and boyfriend, but then that’s a word people mae up and put on situations. We are what we always were, what we were that day when we came back from a funeral and Jay undressed before me and then we went to bed.

Jay is cooking chicken and dumplings and the apartment smells so good. The apartment smells like when we lived together and wherever we were, a house became a home. Jay could take anything from a cupboard and whatever from a refrigerator and make gold. He comes to the room and climbs back into bed with me.

“I was thinking,” he begins.

“Before you think,” I tell him, “I need to tell you something.”

“Alright?”

“I’m going to North Dakota. I’m going to monastery.”

“What?”

“I’m getting clean. I’m tired of what I’ve been.”

Jay is very measured, very silent about this. Very…. Jay.

“I’m going at Christmastime. I need to…. Understand some things. About the world. About myself. I need to… give God a chance.”

Jay is looking at me with a great deal of love nad he puts his hands in my curls.

“What are you thinking?” I ask him.

He does not have his glasses on, His eyes are very wide and hazel He pulls my head down so I cannot see them and kisses me deeply, in the center of my head. While my head is still bowed and he is embracing me, Jay says, “Don’t stay gone too long.”

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