Mercy by Andrea Dworkin Page B

couldn’t just stay there with her and
    she assumed everyone had some place to go because that’s
    how life is it seems in the main and I went to the peace office
    and instead o f typing letters for the peace boys I wrote to
    newspapers saying I had been hurt and it was bad and not all
    right and because I didn’t know sophisticated words I used the
    words I knew and they were very shocked to death; and the
    peace boys were in the office and I refused to type a letter for

    one o f them because I was doing this and he read m y letter out
    loud to everyone in the room over m y shoulder and they all
    laughed at me, and I had spelled America with a “ k ” because I
    knew I was in K afka’s world, not Jefferson ’s, and I knew
    Am erika was the real country I lived in, and they laughed that I
    couldn’t spell it right. The peace wom an fed me sometimes
    and let me sleep there sometimes and she talked to me so I
    learned some words I could use with her but I didn’t tell her
    most things because I didn’t know how and she had an
    apartment and w asn’t conversant with how things were for
    me and I didn’t want to say but also I couldn’t and also there
    was no reason to try, because it is as it is. I’m me, not her in her
    apartment. Y ou always have your regular life. She’d say she
    could see I was tired and did I want to sleep and I’d say no and
    she’d insist and I never understood how she could tell but I was
    so tired. I had a room I always stayed in. It was small but it was
    warm and there were blankets and there was a door that closed
    and she’d be there and she didn’t let anyone come in after me.
    M aybe she would have let me stay there more if I had known
    how to say some true things about day to day but I didn’t ask
    anything from anyone and I never would because I couldn’t
    even be sure they would understand, even her. And what I
    told her when she made me talk to her was how once you went
    to jail they started sticking things up you. T hey kept putting
    their fingers and big parts o f their whole hand up you, up your
    vagina and up your rectum; they searched you inside and
    stayed inside you and kept touching you inside and they
    searched inside your mouth with their fingers and inside your
    ears and nose and they made you squat in front o f the guards to
    see i f anything fell out o f you and stand under a cold shower
    and make different poses and stances to see if anything fell out
    o f you and then they had someone w ho they said was a nurse
    put her hands up you again and search your vagina again and
    search your rectum again and I asked her w hy do you do this,

    why, you don’t have to do this, and she said she was looking
    for heroin, and then the next day they took me to the doctors
    and there were two o f them and one kept pressing me all over
    down on my stomach and under where m y stomach is and all
    down near between my legs and he kept hurting me and
    asking me if I hurt and I said yes and every time I said yes he did
    it harder and I thought he was trying to find out if I was sick
    because he was a doctor and I was in so much pain I must be
    very sick like having an appendicitis all over down there but
    then I stopped saying anything because I saw he liked pressing
    harder and making it hurt more and so I didn’t answer him but
    I had some tears in m y eyes because he kept pressing anyway
    but I wouldn’t let him see them as best as it was possible to turn
    m y head from where he could see and they made jokes, the
    doctors, about having sex and having girls and then the big
    one who had been watching and laughing took the speculum
    which I didn’t know what it was because I had never seen one
    or had anyone do these awful things to me and it was a big,
    cold, metal thing and he put it in me and he kept twisting it and
    turning it and he kept tearing me to pieces which is literal
    because I was ripped up inside and the inside o f me was bruised
    like fists had beaten me all