Mercy by Andrea Dworkin Read Free Book Online Page B

it is they think they’re doing when
    they threaten you all the time. The bomb was coming but I
    had to stay after school. I was supposed to be frightened o f
    staying after school instead o f the bomb or more than the
    bomb. Adults are so awful. Their faces get all pulled and tight
    and mean and they want to hit you but the law says they can’t
    so they make you miserable for as long as they can and they
    call your parents to say you are bad and they try to get your
    parents to hit you because it’s legal and to punish you some
    more. You ask them why you have to cover your ears with
    your elbows and they tell you it is so your ear drums w on ’t get
    hurt from the noise. They consult each other in whispers and
    this is the answer they come up with. I said I thought m y ear
    drums would probably burn with the rest o f me so I got
    punished more. I kept waiting to see them wink or smile or
    laugh or something even just among themselves even though
    it w ouldn’t be nice to show they knew it was crap but they
    acted serious like they meant it. They kept telling you that you
    were supposed to respect them but you would have had to take

    stupid pills. I kept thinking about what it meant that this was
    m y life and I was going to die and I thought I could say asshole
    i f I wanted and face whatever w ay I wanted and I didn’t
    understand w hy I couldn’t take a walk in the fucking spring air
    if I wanted but I knew i f I tried they would hurt me by making
    me into a juvenile delinquent which was a trick they had if you
    did things they didn’t like. I kept reading Buber and tried to
    say I-Thou but they were I-It material no matter how hard I
    tried. I thought maybe he had never encountered anything like
    them where he lived. I kept writing papers for English on
    Buber’s philosophy so I could keep in touch with I-Thou even
    though I was surrounded by I-It. I tried to reason it out but I
    couldn’t. I mean, they were going to die too and all they could
    think o f was keeping you in line and stopping you from
    whispering and making you stare at a wall. I kept thinking
    they were ghosts already, just dead already. Sometimes I
    thought that was the answer— adults were dead people in
    bodies giving stupid orders. They thought I was fresh but it
    was nothing like what I felt inside. Outside I was calm. Inside I
    kept screaming in m y brain: are you alive, are you zombies,
    the bomb is coming, assholes. Why do we have to stand in
    line? W hy aren’t we allowed to talk? Can I kiss Paul S. now?
    Before I die; fast; one time? In your last fucking minute on
    earth can’t you do one fucking human thing like do something
    or say something or believe something or show something or
    cry or laugh or teach us how to fight the Goddamn Russians or
    anything, anything , and not just make us stand here and be
    quiet like assholes? I wanted to scream and in m y brain I
    screamed, it was a real voice screaming like something so loud
    it could make your head explode but I was too smart to scream
    in real life so I asked quietly and intelligently w hy we couldn’t
    talk and they said we might miss important instructions. I
    mean: important instructions ; do you grasp it? I didn’t scream
    because I knew there might be a tom orrow but one day there

    wouldn’t and I would be as big an asshole as the teachers not to
    have screamed, a shithead hypocrite because I didn’t believe
    tom orrow was coming, one day it wouldn’t come, but I
    would die pretending like them, acting nice, not screaming. I
    wanted to scream at them and make them tell me the truth—
    would there be a tomorrow or not? When I was a child they
    made us hide under our desks, crawl under them on our knees
    and keep our heads down and cover our ears with our elbows
    and keep our hands clasped behind our heads. I use to pray to
    God not to have it hurt when the bomb came. They said it was
    practice for when the Russians bombed us so we would live
    after it and I was as