Mercy

loud stories, vulgar jokes; and then, with me, quiet, shy, so

shy. I met him when he had just come back from driving an

illegal car two times in the last month into Eastern Europe,

crossing the borders illegally into Stalinist Eastern bloc

countries— I never understood exactly which side he was

on— he said both— he said he took illegal things in and illegal

people out— borders didn’t stop him, armies didn’t stop him, I

crossed borders with him later, he could cross any border; he

wore a red star he said the Soviets had given him, a star o f

honor from the government that only some party insiders ever

got, and then he fucked them over by delivering anarchy in his

forays in and out o f their fortressed imperial possessions. He

had a Russian nickname, his nom de guerre, and since his life was

subversion, an assault on society, war against all shit and all

authority, his nom de guerre was his name, the only name

anyone knew he had; no one could trace him to his fam ily, his

origins, where he slept: a son paying rent. Except me. In fact

the cops arrested him for not paying traffic tickets, thousands

o f dollars, under the conventional birth name; he ended in the

real prison resisting arrest. Even in jail he was still safely

underground, the nom de guerre unconnected to him, the body

in custody. When I married him I got his real name planted on

me by law and I knew his secrets, this one and then others,

slow ly all o f them, the revolutionary ones and the ones that

went with being a boy o f his time, his class, his parents, a boy

raised to conform, a boy given a dull, stupid name so he would

be dull and stupid, a boy named to become a man who would

live to collect a pension. I was M rs. him, the female one o f him

by law, a legal incarnation o f what he fucking hated, an actual

legal entity, because there is no Mrs. nom de guerre and no girl’s

name ever mattered on the streets or underground, not her

own real name anyway, only if she was some fox to him, a

legendary fox. I was one: yeah, a great one. I had m y time. But

it was nasty to become Mrs. his Christian names and his

daddy’s last name, the w ay they say M rs. Edw ard Jam es Fred

Smith, as if she’s not Sally or Jane; the wedding was m y

baptism, m y naming, Mrs. what he hates, the one who needs

furniture and money, the one you come home to which means

you got to be somewhere, a rule, a law, Mrs. the law, the one

who says get the mud o ff your shoes because it’s dirtying the

floor, the one who just cleaned the fucking floor after all. I

never thought about mud in my whole fucking life but when

you clean the floor you want to be showed respect. I lived with

him before we got married; we were great street fighters; we

were great. N o one could follow the chaos we made, the

disruptions, the lightning-fast transgressions o f law; passports, borders, taking people or things here