Mercy

a fraternal affection that was real and warm and robust and sort

o f interesting on its own, always sort o f reaching out towards

him, and I felt tender towards him, tender near him, next to

him, lying next to him; and we were intense, a little on edge,

when we holed up together, carnal; our home was the bed we

were in, a bed, an empty room, the floor, an em pty room,

maybe not a regular home like you see on television but we

wasn’t like them on television, there w asn’t tw o people like us

anywhere, so fragile and so reckless and so strong, we were

with each other and for each other, we didn’t hide where we

had been before, what we had done, we had secrets but not

from each other and there w asn’t anything that made us dirty

to each other and we embraced each other and we were going

to hole up together, kind o f a home, us against them, I guess,

and we didn’t have no money or ideas, you know , pictures in

your head from magazines about how things should be—

plates, detergents, how them crazy wom en smile in advertisements. It’s all around you but you don’t pick it up unless you got some time and money and neither o f us had ever

been a citizen in that sense. We were revolutionaries, not

consumers— not little boy-girl dolls all polished and smiling

with little tea sets playing house. We were us, unto ourselves.

We found a small place without any floor at all, you had to

walk on the beams, and he built the floor so the landlord let us

stay there. We planned the political acts there, the chaos we

delivered to the status quo, the acts o f disruption, rebellion.

We hid out there, kept low , kept out o f sight; you turn where

you are into a friendly darkness that hides you. We embraced

there, a carnal embrace— after an action or during the long

weeks o f planning or in the interstices where we drenched

ourselves in hashish and opium until a paralysis overtook us

and the smoke stopped all the time. I liked that; how

everything slowed down; and I liked fucking after a strike, a

proper climax to the real act— I liked how everything got fast

and urgent; fast, hard, life or death; I liked bed then, after,

when we was drenched in perspiration from what came

before; I liked revolution as foreplay; I liked how it made you

supersensitive so the hairs on your skin were standing up and

hurt before you touched them, could feel a breeze a mile away,

it hurt, there was this reddish pain, a soreness parallel to your

skin before anything touched you; I liked how you was tired

before you began, a fatigue that came because the danger was

over, a strained, taut fatigue, an ache from discipline and

attentiveness and from the imposition o f a superhuman

quietness on the body; I liked it. I liked it when the embrace

was quiet like the strike itself, a subterranean quiet, disciplined, with exposed nerve endings that hurt but you don’t say

nothing. Then you sleep. Then you fuck more; hardy; rowdy;

long; slow; now side by side or with me on top and then side