When Mercy woke up, the TV was on. It was too loud. Someone yelling and repeating something, but she couldn’t make it out. She slumped against the body beside her on the couch, and fell back asleep.

And the sons of the universe will follow in the steps of the father and the father will lead. And the father will impose the will of fathers and wives will bow their heads and their daughters will be given in marriage and the daughters will bring forth sons to follow the fathers and they will be sons of the universe. And our blood lines will be clean.

Mercy opened her eyes again. The TV preacher was still parading back and forth across a stage. Belinda should hear this one. She loved those guys. She’d laugh her ass off and never let Mercy turn them off.

“Hey Belinda—” Her throat suddenly hurt so much. Then she thought: who’s Belinda?

“Hey yourself.” The man beside her on the couch turned and half rolled onto her. He kissed her neck.

***

Belinda caught the ghost out of the corner of her eye as she walked to her truck. It barely brushed against her. She could feel it. Feel her. It was Mercy. It had to be. For a moment, she wished for it. But if this was Mercy’s ghost, wouldn’t it mean that Mercy had been killed in the TPI?

After she’d gotten word of it, Belinda left the basement Billy-girl bar she was killing time in after making some deliveries up north, and got into her truck. She sat at the wheel, keys dangling in the ignition. The sense, the feel of the ghost in the cab with her. If it were Mercy. If she were dead.

Belinda started the truck and drove until she could hardly keep her eyes open and had to pull off the highway. The motel she’d randomly picked seemed OK. Nothing smashed outside. No cars driven up onto the front lawn, so The Forgetting or the Temporary Public Insanity or whatever it had been must not have come this way. Belinda wanted to go in and ask where she was so she could figure out where to go next. But she couldn’t quite get herself to even make a move to push open the door. Instead, she sat there, staring out the windshield, wishing she could feel something of Mercy. But the feeling of her had completely departed.

***
Mercy couldn’t get off the couch. She wasn’t really sleeping. Just sitting there, absorbing the room. Trying to remember. Anything at all.

The guy came in with a grilled cheese sandwich for her. Seemed his name was Jeffrey. Maybe it was. When he came out of The Forgetting, he said that’s the name he thought must be his.

“Hungry?” he asked as he handed her the plate. The sandwich was cut on the diagonal, and orange cheese was oozing from the cut. She looked up at him. “Jeffrey?”

“Yeah?”

“Uh, nothing. I mean, thanks. You made this sandwich?”

“Yeah, the fridge is full. So, we’re lucky I guess.” He looked past her, out the living room window. “Where are we? Do you know?”

“No.” Mercy looked around the room. A coffee table with magazines fanned out on it. A couple of arm chairs opposite. An arched doorway to a dining room.

“The fridge is full. They must have shopped right before it happened.”

“OK.” She didn’t know what else to say.

He started back to the kitchen on the other side of the dining room. “There’s all kinds of fruits and vegetables. And a bunch of meat. We’d better eat things before they go bad.”

Mercy felt herself fogging over again. She closed her eyes then opened them to watch him move away from her. “How long have we been here?” But he hadn’t heard.

It had started snowing. She couldn’t remember what the weather had been before The Forgetting. And she couldn’t remember how long ago it had happened. Even the days before it, were white-ish in her mind. Her head ached when she tried to push her thoughts in that direction. The direction of trying to remember. Instead, she watched the snow. Big slow flakes that she now realized had made her happy when she was a little girl. That memory suddenly floating up. And somewhere below, in the basement, the sound of the furnace kicking on. She ate her sandwich. It was so good, it made her think about how hungry she must have been. Soft invisible puffs of heat came towards her from a hidden vent. She felt the room gradually grow warmer. She slipped back into sleep.

Sometime in the night, Mercy woke up cold. The heat had gone off, and she couldn’t get back to sleep on that couch. She wandered the house until she found Jeffrey asleep in an upstairs bedroom. She crawled in behind him and wrapped her arms around him for warmth.

***

The first time Belinda saw Mercy, it had been all about that blond hair. Long straight blond hair hanging down her back. All about that silky hair even before the startingly pretty face, and even before that sexy little body somehow compacted into her snug waitress uniform. A blond in a tight uniform. Belinda hadn’t needed an excuse to while away the afternoon drinking in this cute waitress at a truck stop on a route she didn’t even usually take. It was in a Husky restaurant attached to a gas station off Highway 2. Belinda had just happened upon the station, and liked it because it wasn’t a regular Billy-girl hang out. A bit of a change. The place was filled mostly with exhausted-looking truckers, slumped in booths, drinking coffee and not saying much. Must be her lucky day. She caught the eye of a guy she knew from over Turner Valley way—he half grinned at her and cocked his head over at the blond waitress then nodded at Belinda and leaned back in his own booth to take in the spectacle of her. As Belinda was. Spectacle only because this girl was young and good looking and not sick or crazy like so many.

Then the blond was sauntering over and Belinda figured she’d better order. The girl was eyeing Belinda up and down as she handed over the menu. At the same moment, Belinda blurted, “Just eggs and bacon. And what do you have on the side of it?”

“We got toast. We got hash browns, sausages. Anything you want.”

“Hash browns?” She hadn’t had anything as elaborate as hash browns in a while, and what did it mean, she laughed to herself, that hash browns seemed such a big deal? Though maybe the big deal was this cute waitress.

“You want?” The girl was grinning at her. She must make a killing in tips.

“Sure, I want.”

“And how about some toast? Coffee?”

“Gimme the works.” Now Belinda was feeling like a bit of an idiot, but what the hell? It was a pleasure to watch the girl saunter away, and then another little hit of pleasure to watch her coming back with the coffee pot.

“That your truck out there?” The blond glanced outside and put her hand on her hip, the little flirt.

Belinda nodded, and noticed that “Mercy” was printed on a name tag pinned over her left breast.

“Nice truck,” Mercy said. “Maybe you’ll take me for a spin sometime.” Then a wide smile to show it was just a joke, just a line to pass the time at this little diner attached to a gas station in the middle of nowhere. She must be bored out of her mind, thought Belinda.

Belinda grinned at her and shot back, “Mercy. That your name?”

“Yup,” Mercy did some more looking of her own, then stepped forward and filled Belinda’s cup.

“Maybe I will,” Belinda said.

“Will what?”

Her mouth was wide. Great big luscious mouth. Jesus Christ, thought Belinda.

“Take you for a spin.”

So, there was that.

***

In the days that followed, Mercy began to feel hemmed in by houses that all looked the same: two-storey white-ish numbers joined at the hip. The days were blank with a whiteness that had less to do with the snow which was already melting, and more to do with the inside of Mercy’s head. With The Forgetting. She and Jeffrey had seen reports of it on TV. Seems they had been in the very thick of it. The bad news was that The Forgetting had been preceded by days of wild TPI. Temporary Public Insanity.

“Worst in years,” the newsreader flinched a little when he said it, then the newscast rolled out dozens of edited together clips of people wandering around like zombies in the aftermath of the latest Mass Forgetting. “Of course, we couldn’t get any live footage of the TPI itself, but we do have testimonials from folks who lived through it,” at which point Jeffrey turned off the TV.

“We don’t need to hear that,” he said, so Mercy wondered if he remembered more than she did. Maybe better to have these running-together, whited-out days in the suburbs, if that’s where they were. Indistinguishable houses all up and down the gentle curve of the street. When she’d gazed out an upstairs window, she’d seen a street of identical houses on the other side of the backyard, and then another identical street behind it. Only a few trees. Somewhere beyond the white slush of her post-Forgetting mind, she was almost sure she hadn’t always lived like this.

Just yesterday, she’d found Jeffrey in the bathroom, replacing a complicated looking bloody gauze on his hand. Maybe it was yesterday.

“Where do you think we are?” she asked Jeffrey the next time he brought her a little snack and plopped down beside her on the couch. He sure seemed to like fussing in the kitchen. Mercy didn’t have the energy.

“I’m not sure,” he answered. “Might be Calgary.”

“Calgary,” she said, savoring the taste of the word, listening to herself say it out loud. Calgary suddenly made sense to her. She remembered telling someone she would only be a few days and that the camp was just outside of Calgary. What camp? Who was she talking to?

***

After a couple more times of dropping in on the Husky, even though she had plenty of other places she needed to be, Belinda asked Mercy if she wanted to go for a ride when her shift was over. Mercy had been in the middle of writing out the bill when Belinda asked her. She couldn’t see the point of it. Belinda mostly ordered breakfast or later in the day, soup or whatever the special was, and there didn’t seem to ever be enough customers in the place to make the writing out of bills worthwhile. Belinda thought of the paper shortage—didn’t this waitress gal know about it? —and how colony girls up and down her route were always clambering for any paper she could get to them. But Belinda had come to like watching Mercy standing in front of her, the tip of her tongue at the corner of her mouth as she wrote down all that Belinda had eaten. That loopy handwriting of hers.

“Anywhere in particular you want to go?” They were in the pickup. Mercy staring, rapt, out the windshield.

“No, just drive,” she said.

And they did, in silence. Belinda thought of flicking on the radio but didn’t. Mercy kept turning her head from the front window to the passenger side. Sometimes she turned, a big grin on her face, to look out the back. The road in the back held the same view as the front. Big sky, rolling land, and black top, somewhat rutted and in need of repairs that didn’t have a hope in hell of ever getting done. “Is this what you do?” she asked. “Drive around all the time? At the restaurant they said you were a kind of importer or dealer or something.”

“Yeah.” Belinda was still getting over how fast Mercy had grabbed her jacket on the way out of the restaurant. Still getting over that Mercy had agreed to come out with her in the first place.

“So, you get to drive every day? Anywhere you want to go?”

Belinda just nodded.

“Lucky,” said Mercy.

And a few days after that, Belinda had the pleasure of watching Mercy with her eyes closed and a private smile on that luscious mouth, dancing by herself to Stevie Wonder’s You are the Sunshine of my Life on the juke box. The restaurant was deserted but for the cook and dishwasher at the back, so it was a bit of a private show, though Mercy seemed so unselfconscious and relaxed that it maybe wasn’t a show at all.

Belinda couldn’t enjoy this as long as she would have liked because two Road-Billy’s stumbled in and slid into the booth across from her. She knew one of the women vaguely from swap meets in Red Deer. They wanted to exchange news, as was customary, and the one she sort of knew proposed that Belinda put a northern Billy-girl colony on her route.

“My niece just went in. Made it permanent.”

Belinda guessed the girl had said some kind of final vows. There were colonies that went in for that sort of thing.

“Could you step in on her?” The woman asked, sliding a carton of Camels across the table. “Put her on your trade route? I want to make sure she gets enough to eat up there and all.”

Two days after Belinda made that trip north, the TPI hit. The one that took Mercy.

***

Mercy slept a lot. When she woke up, if she could hear Jeffrey in the kitchen, she’d let herself go under again. This thick soft drug, this relief of sleep was all she wanted. She didn’t want to strain to remember that thing just on the outer edge of her mind, that thing she couldn’t remember because she was afraid to remember. Somewhere on that edge of sleeping and waking, there was something waiting for her to recall it. Something that was not good. Something she’d seen, or more likely something she’d done.

Or Mercy would wake up to feel Jeffrey beside her on the couch, his face illuminated in the light of the television. As soon as she’d open her eyes, he’d start talking, usually about whatever was on TV. He’d keep flipping around, looking for news shows that could explain about the TPI, about how bad it had been. About how great swaths of downtown were still burning.

Or she’d wake up in a sitting position, and she’d be the one pressing and pressing the white triangle on the remote control moving the channels up and down.

In the slow days that followed, Mercy gradually became conscious of the sting of a series of scrapes and cuts on the skin of her face, the bruised feelings in her arms, the ache in her shoulders, and the sharp stabbing pain in her ribs when she tried to take a deep breath. And Mercy became conscious of how much it hurt to sit down for long periods, though standing up was just as bad, and how sore her vagina felt. She didn’t want to think about any of this.

“Looks like you took one hell of a beating,” Jeffrey said when he came upon her one night as she was getting undressed for bed.

“What do you know about it?” But she had no desire to look at herself in the mirror or inspect her sore body too closely.

Her question seemed to startle him, and for a second, he looked hard at her as if he were trying to figure something out. Then he said, “Nothing. I don’t really remember very much.”

She suddenly wanted to press it, though it had become the kind of thing that made her head ache. “Well, what do you remember?”

He walked away, saying in a choked sort of way, “Probably as much as you.”

She didn’t believe him.

***

When Belinda pulled open the screen door to the motel, there was a clash of bells from the string of them hooked to the top corner of the door.

“Get the fuck out of here. We’re closed.”

A woman stepped out from behind the counter holding a baseball bat.

“Door’s open,” commented Belinda.

The woman holding the bat raised it a few inches. “You alone?”

“Yeah.”

“None a them freaks with you?” The woman was visibly trembling.

“You had TPI-ers through here?”

“No. I locked up. Shut off all the lights. Padlocked my shutters. That shit has happened before so I’m prepared.

“Nobody at all has come through then?” Belinda asked again.

“No. My place was dark. Couldn’t see nothing from the two-lane. Crazies couldn’t see my place a-tall.”

***

Every few seconds Mercy pressed her thumb down hard onto the small white triangle on the remote. She was looking for TPI footage because now she was pretty sure that’s what she had been in. What they both had been in. Jeffrey woke up, yelling, from nightmares most nights. She’d lie as still as she could and listen to him sob. She didn’t want to know what he dreamed. It still felt a little weird that she’d begun spending most nights in his bed. It didn’t feel quite right, but she didn’t know what else to do since they were now living in this house together. Man and wife.

She realized that looking for live TPI footage didn’t make a whole lot of sense because if a camera crew was caught up in one, they simply would have dropped their equipment and joined the fray. The camera and light equipment would have been turned into weapons or gotten smashed up pretty quickly. There could be no record of the all-out insanity, except maybe the first few seconds before the cameramen were taken. Mercy was learning from all her TV watching that most of what was known about Temporary Public Insanity came from surveillance cameras mounted on streetlights or from security footage in grocery stores or malls or offices or wherever. People indiscriminately beating the crap out of each other. And worse.

Sometimes the scenes on the TPI documentaries were run in slow motion or in repeating loops. Sometimes there were freeze frames presumably so the TV audience could try to identify someone they had lost. Or so they could recognize themselves. And then they would learn what they had done.

There were addresses running along the bottom of the screen of places where you could go and watch hours of similar footage. This was useless to Mercy who didn’t recognize any of the street names. Also, she had no intention of going outside.

“There’s not much left in the kitchen.” Jeffrey walked into the living room drying his hands on a dish towel.

Mercy clicked the television off. She wanted to say, “What do you want me to do about it?” because he was getting on her nerves with all this fussing and worrying about food. But she could see he was scared. He kept glancing out the big window facing the street where people wandered around, sometimes two or three together, but mostly the wanderers were on their own. There was one fat guy in a beige golf jacket who Mercy recognized from this morning and also from yesterday when he’d passed three or four times. He was carrying the same brown paper bag as he had yesterday. He walked really slowly. He stared at the sidewalk.

It had been two weeks, at least, since Mercy had woken up on the blue couch in this suburban house. She still couldn’t remember her life before The Forgetting.

***

Belinda got back into her truck and drove. She didn’t know what else to do. There was no point in looking for Mercy at this time of night. Belinda knew she wouldn’t find her. She turned on the radio. It was some rabid preacher.

And in retribution for the evil of a world that had turned away from him, God caused a great rupture in the skin of the earth and hell and all her demons came whirling up out of that gaping maw and infested the earth in a fog of chaos and terror.

And the men of the earth were awash in chaos. And each man smote his brother where he stood and also his brother’s sons who he cut down without thought because thought and reason had flown away from all men in the chaos of the wicked stinking hell that swirled and jeered and cackled and japed in the air all around.

And each man went unto his brother’s wife and also unto his brother’s daughters, viciously rendering them into harlots and making them therefore unfit for any other man.

And the wives and the daughters were shamed and turned each against each. The daughters smote the mothers and the mothers cursed and strangled their own babes even as they suckled at the breast.

***

Mercy dreamed about a couple having sex in the dark. She could hear them murmuring and moaning together. Then she could feel them. Mercy shuddered awake to discover herself in bed with Jeffrey who was now different from his docile daytime version. It was all unfamiliar—abnormal—even though the sex felt really good.

***

Belinda, who was otherwise unaffiliated, sported a small orange tattoo just below her left shoulder. The tattoo was a stylized flame.

Belinda thought of Mercy’s skin. Not a mark on it. Not a single tag, no affiliation at all. Completely blank. The beauty of that. The mystery. If Belinda wanted to know anything, she had to ask.

“Like in the olden days,” she said, though Mercy, being so much younger, didn’t really know what she was talking about.

The women Belinda had been with before Mercy had all been marked in some way. Most of them anyway. Covered in complicated story-telling tattoos that revealed their lineage, affiliation or clan, if they had one. The first thing she’d do—well, not the very first thing—once they’d been to bed a couple of times, was to get the stories behind the markings and symbols on their skin. The girls were usually glad to give them up, each tattoo’s backstory. Sometimes on her trading route, Belinda would meet an old girlfriend who, last time, just had a shoulder tattoo, or maybe something at the back of her neck, and the next time, the girl would have a whole sleeve of images. First one arm, then after an interval of a few months or even years, a tattooed sleeve on the other arm. Always a delight to find the girl under her ink. They’d make it into a kind of foreplay.

Tattoos weren’t restricted to Billy-girls. Could be Fire Sisters or even non-religious women she’d meet in pool halls when she’d trade in the city. Or in bars, or even more prosaic hang outs like coffee shops or libraries where women could meet to swap road news about where it was or wasn’t safe to travel.

Not only women either. There had also been a couple of guys in Belinda’s life. She liked truckers and mechanics, of course, but one time she settled down for half a year with a guy who ran a little motel in Atlas. It was his decentness, his steady kindness, also his sexy shoulders, that kept her using his motel for a home base for a bit. His tattoos were less thematic or symbolic than women’s generally were, Billy-girls anyway. He said he’d get inked when something he wanted to hang onto caught his eye. A Scottish thistle, a dirt bike, a band logo, words and phrases in what he thought might have been Gaelic, a naked girl with a skull face and a crown of flowers. The usual cute-guy shit.

Mercy had been so different. Completely unmarked. Pristine.

***

Mercy stayed inside the house with Jeffrey, and eased into living as his wife. A housewife, because she eventually got off that couch and started to move through the rooms. She took up dusting and vacuuming. She seemed to remember that she used to be a person who enjoyed the modern conveniences of washers and dryers and dishwashers. Sometimes, she stood in the basement and just listened to the clothes dryer hum.

“You know,” Jeffrey sniffed one afternoon when she brought up a laundry basket of clothes still warm from the dryer. “You could hang those up on the line. It’s better for the environment.” She didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. Anyway, there was no way she was going outside.

She had nothing to do but explore the contents of the house. She started in the basement and was able to report to Jeffrey that there was plenty of extra food down there. Another pantry full of canned goods and unopened boxes of cereal and really large paper sacks of flour and sugar. Then there was the freezer: frozen pork chops, chicken parts, and the humped shapes of two or three roast beefs. Along with plastic bags of frozen peas and carrots, Mercy thought they could hole up here for a while yet.

Even though it felt like Jeffrey’s domain, Mercy also worked her way through the kitchen: touching each group of pots and stack of plates. She counted the cutlery in its contact paper-lined drawer and wiped accumulated dust from extra glasses and cups and saucers on the top shelf. There were so many cleaning products under the sink, and such a bundle of tea towels in a deep drawer beside the fridge.

The living room, with its expanse of wall-to-wall carpeting needed to be vacuumed and this was something Mercy discovered she absolutely loved doing. It had the same hypnotic effect on her as the humming dryer downstairs. It soothed her and smoothed out her thoughts when they threatened to overwhelm her with the fact that she no recollection of her life from before. She had no idea who she had been or who she was now. The only thing she had come out of the Forgetting with was her own name. She was pretty sure of her name. She seemed to even remember someone calling her by that name, though she couldn’t place the voice she sometimes now heard in her head.

Then there was the opulent master bedroom upstairs. A bed that Jeffrey told her was called king sized. There was a matching set of night tables, two larger dressers, an arm chair in one corner with a lamp curling over it and one small table beside it, piled with magazines: Style and House Beautiful and Architectural Digest. One wall was all mirrors, and behind them, the sliding doors of his and hers clothes closets.

Hers was a revelation: dresses and blouses in every colour, woolen skirts and matching blazers. There were gauzy scarves in lavender and dusty rose in the top drawer of the dresser. The clothes fit her, more or less. But they were the kind of clothes she had never worn: fancy under-wire bras and silky underwear. There was something still wrapped up with a cardboard backing that turned out to be panty hose which weirdly changed the colour of her legs and gave them a muffled, held-in feeling which made the high-heeled shoes (“Pumps”, commented Jeffrey admiringly) slide beautifully onto her feet. Then there was this other thing she was supposed to pull and snap onto her body so the skirts and blouses and dresses would fit properly.

“That’s some girdle,” breathed Jeffrey who’d taken to sitting on the bed and watching Mercy try on the variety of costumes. “But these aren’t costumes,” he said. “Just regular clothes.”

“Not for me, they’re not,” said Mercy, tucking and arranging herself into some particularly complicated shapewear. Then she stood before him. “What do you think?”

“Holy shit.” It came out as a low sigh. He grabbed hold of her and bent her over the bed, and took her from behind. It was so quick, Mercy felt a little stunned. But as had been the case when they had that unexpected sex at night, she found she liked it. For the few minutes it took for him to abruptly come, she didn’t have to think about anything, didn’t have to try again to remember everything she had forgotten.

***

Belinda passed a faded billboard for a Billy-Girl festival.

Come to Billy Death Day
Bring Something to Burn Your wedding ring The deed to your gutted House
Your Stolen Child’s doll The Dress you were Raped in

That last phrase tripped Belinda up for a second. The truck swerved towards the centre line. The dress you were raped in. What kind of thing was that to hang onto? What kind of godawful artifact? Wouldn’t you want to get rid of it? Rip it off so you could get into a shower and try to scrub that bastard out of you. Or in Belinda’s case: two bastards. Father and son. Not that she managed to. Scrub them out.

She hadn’t thought of it in a long time. Her first rape. “The thing to do,” everyone said, everyone knew, “is to put it completely away”. The memory of it. “It does you no good,” people said. Women said.

Bullshit advice, that.

Now the memory of it crash-landed onto her, and Belinda knew she had to pull over. She could only stare at the mess of dead bugs on her windshield for so long before she needed to get out of her truck. She leaned against the front of it and lit a smoke. Father and son. How sick is that?

“The boy’s got to learn,” the father had said. He was shoving her out of the corner store where she had just picked up a six-pack. Belinda looked into the jittery black and white security camera above the door. The father’s gun or screwdriver or whatever it was felt sharp against her back. His other hand twisting her arm behind her. She only got a rapid flicker of a look at the guy behind the counter. Just standing there with his hands dangling at his sides, his face turned away. A boy, who turned out to be the son, had a little handgun trained on the guy behind the counter. Amazing how much could dash through your mind in those last minutes before you got raped, she thought when it was over, and she was slumped against a brick wall in the alley where it had happened.

“Drink up, little bitch.” The father had actually tossed a beer at her before he pushed his still bawling son ahead of him out of the alley. He was just a kid, she realized. Though he’d seemed older and bigger when he was on top of her. “C’mon son,” the father growled. “You got to try it with another one. You got to get it done.”

***

Mercy knew she hadn’t always lived in this large house with its huge garage jutting out of the front of it. There was something not right, not familiar about the thick soft carpeting, dark blue, wall to wall. Something distinctly new about padding around in a house – no sounds as her sock feet were absorbed, which was not the right word, but she did feel absorbed. She began to feel as if she were being absorbed into the deep dark blue carpeting, into the house itself. The socks were not hers. She had known that right away when she had first woken up on that couch, also blue. But a more greenish blue. Aqua. The word was almost a taste on the tongue of memory. But she had no memory, and the word aqua itself seemed fake. Everything did. And these wonderfully thick socks didn’t really belong to her. Did they? They seemed fake too.

Nothing in this house belonged to her and she didn’t belong in this house. She was living here, strutting around in extravagant underwear for a man who didn’t belong here either. She was wearing some other woman’s clothing, eating off her dishes, using her shampoo and conditioner, sleeping in her bed.

And where had this other woman, the woman of the house, where had she gone? Has she taken my place on the front seat of Belinda’s truck? Mercy wondered. Because Belinda had come back. A memory, this one of being in her truck, had come back to Mercy sometime in the middle of having sex with Jeffrey. Once, after she had been modeling the woman of the house’s clothes for him: putting them on, taking them off, and they had thrashed around on the bed, she had been surprised to hear a voice—her own voice, it seemed—calling for someone named Belinda as she came and came. Jeffrey, grunting above her, had managed to gasp, “Who’s Belinda?” before he collapsed on top of her.

Or was it only later? Did he ask her in the dark of the master bedroom after they had rolled away from each other and lay staring up at nothing?

Or was it the next day before he went to work? Because it seemed Jeffrey had simply decided to go out and get a job. He had been flipping through the line of dress shirts, ties, suit jackets and dress pants hanging in the mirrored closet beside Mercy’s own dress-stuffed one.

“If so many parts of the city were in The Forgetting, one of those big bank towers downtown is bound to be looking for people.” He picked up a briefcase lying on the floor of the closet, and opened it. “Well, look at this.” He held up a business card. “Seems I’ve already got a job, at an oil company.” He raised his eyebrows at Mercy. “And I’ve got a name too: Jonathan Buck.” After that, Jeffrey went to work each day as Jonathan, and occasionally referred to her as “Mrs. Buck”.

Belinda bothered him though.

“Who the hell is Belinda?”

Mercy sat on the bed, studying herself in the same mirror over the wide dresser where Jeffrey looked as he knotted his tie and turned into Jonathan Buck.

“Belinda is someone I love.” As she heard the words come out of her mouth, parts of Belinda came flooding back into her tattered memory.

“Who is she? Your sister? Your mum?” He had put on one of Jonathan’s suit jackets and was turning this way and that as he scrutinized his reflection.

“Belinda was…is my girlfriend,” Mercy said, suddenly realizing this was true. “My lover.”

“You a dyke?” He turned and looked at her.

She laughed, “I guess I am.” She hadn’t heard that word in a while.

He smirked. “Not now you’re not.” Jeffrey checked his hair in the mirror. It had some kind of sheen to it. “It’s gel,” he said, when she’d asked. Along with this new hair and new clothes, Jeffrey took up what Mercy began to understand was Jonathan’s personality. It had been increasing over the past few days.

***

My God, she thought, as she drove past the billboard. Haven’t been to a Billy Death Day Festival in years. She remembered that old song the colony girls taught their daughters: And Billy burned and Billy burned and Billy burned. His ash fell down from the sky and we opened our mouths and ate that fire and now he is alive again. And now he is alive.

All she could think about was Mercy. Mercy whose smooth white skin had not a single mark of affiliation. Belinda remembered asking her, “Why didn’t your mother have you tattooed when you were young? I mean, you grew you in a girl-camp, didn’t you?”

Mercy had just laughed, “My mom wasn’t into that sort of thing. Plus, our camp wasn’t so political, or even religious. We all could do what we wanted.” She rolled over onto top of Belinda to end that particular conversation. Mercy laughed her throaty laugh and whispered in her ear, “Who gives a crap about getting inked or about that old camp. I’m out with you now. Not in a tent anymore, but fooling around with my girlfriend in a real live bed in a motel with hot frickin’ water in the real live shower stall!”

***

Jeffrey no longer brought her those little snacks as she sat on the couch, though she didn’t sit around and watch TV so much anymore. As the blankness following the Forgetting began to lift, she’d taken up housework with increased vigor. That and her slow exploring of the inside of the house.

By late afternoon, tiredness would begin creeping up on her, because as she vacuumed or scrubbed the bathtub, her mind was able to wander out farther than the confines of the house. She began to half-daydream, half remember her former life. Or small parts of it. She remembered driving, she remembered carrying two or three plates at a time across a red and black tiled floor, a bell continually tinging at her. And she remembered being in a clearing full of tents illuminated from within. Tents at night. The smell of a campfire.

All this pushing her mind out as far as it could go exhausted her, so she’d lie down upstairs. She’d take off her housecleaning clothes and put on one of the underwear costumes or something Jeffrey had once requested called “baby dolls” which were a tiny pajama top with strange puffy sleeves and a pair of shorts in the same material with the same puffy detailing at the top of her thighs. She’d burrow under the duvet, and as soon as she’d warm up, she’d fall asleep until Jeffrey came home from work.

“You whore.” He’d come straight up to the bedroom after work. “You fantastic little whore,” he’d whisper in his Jonathan Buck voice before their early evening sex. Something of the old Jeffrey remained though, because he’d sometimes bring home take-out for supper. They’d eat in bed and watch the news which was still dominated by TPI coverage.

One morning, a fog rolled in. Mercy looked out at the thick whiteness as she did the breakfast dishes, standing at the sink overlooking the back yard which had been replaced by swirling nothingness. The fog faded by early afternoon, and Mercy could again watch the wanderers outside shuffling up and down the street, clutching whatever it was they clutched in their curled hands.

She turned on the TV, but it was nothing but snow: small white dots dancing in a way that was easy to get lost in. The sound was all harsh static, so Mercy muted it. The radio, when she tried it, had been taken over by a rhythmic rushing that eventually settled into the sound of ocean waves. Mercy sat gratefully in a kitchen chair, and closed her eyes and listened.

She thought the phone rang. She thought she answered it.

It sounded like Belinda. Mercy felt something abrupt give way inside her fogged mind.

“Mercy, where are you? I’ve looked everywhere.” Belinda’s blustery voice.

“I’m at the house,” she replied, with some confusion.

“Where? What’s the address?”

Mercy couldn’t bring herself to answer that she didn’t know. She said, “It’s a white house with grey trim.” She only thought this must be true because all the other houses on the street were white with grey trim. “People wander around outside,” she said, and started to cry.

Some days she’d wake up on the couch rather than in bed. Sometimes Jeffrey sat on the couch beside her, muttering and twitching in his own dreams. Sometimes he was off at work when she woke up. If that’s where he actually went every day, she thought. Work.

Then there was housework and a period of rest before Jeffrey or Jonathan would come home and force her through her erotic paces. She wondered how much longer all of this could go on.

Another day, the fog came right into the house with them, blanking out most of the rooms. Then Jeffrey or Jonathan began to tell her about his dreams. His nightmares.

He began to remember what he’d done during the Temporary Public Insanity.