For several months I had been staring at the words written in a square on the otherwise blank calendar on my kitchen wall: Meeting Mr. Mercy.
I had scheduled this meeting back in the late spring, and only after a series of mysterious phone calls and false starts. Most of the phone calls would come late at night, from an area code and a phone number that I was later able to trace to a Wal-Mart calling card and a computerized phone bank in Atlanta.
The voice on the other end of the line was always the same, and seemed to belong to an older woman; if I had to guess at an approximate age I suppose I would have said mid- to late-fifties. There was something I wanted to describe as tremulous in the voice, despite which I would characterize it as nothing if not business-like.
Mr. Mercy, I was told, would see me at his convenience, yet his convenience was a complicated business, as one might well imagine. There were a great many demands on his time, and he did a good deal of traveling in his line of work. He would, the woman assured me, do whatever he could to make our meeting as logistically convenient for me as possible, but I was also warned that I should be prepared to travel.
I was, of course, fully prepared to travel, anxious as I had long been for a meeting with Mr. Mercy. This was good, the woman said; flexibility on my part would ensure that the meeting went as smoothly as possible, and even so there was always the chance of some unforeseen complication at the last minute.
And so it was that I eventually found myself stepping from a Greyhound bus on a bitter and unseasonably cold night in late autumn. I had traveled for more than twenty-four hours to the modest town in Pennsylvania where I was to meet Mr. Mercy.
It had taken me, as I said, many months of rather complicated wrangling to arrange this meeting, and I had made the trip at considerable expense and inconvenience to my personal and professional life. I had heard things, certainly, rumors that had over time almost assumed the proportions of myth, yet I still had no real idea what to expect from my visit. I had been explicitly informed that so far as the intercession of Mr. Mercy was concerned there were absolutely no guarantees. It was entirely possible, his intermediary had told me during our last telephone conversation, that even having made the long trek to Pennsylvania I might still be denied an audience with Mr. Mercy. He might well be indisposed, or otherwise occupied with business of far greater import than what the voice on the other end of the line had called my own “rather insignificant concerns.” He could also, I was led to understand, be called away on a moment’s notice. Mr. Mercy did a great deal of urgent traveling and –I was once again reminded– he was a busy man and mine was “a minor case.”
Even now I am not entirely sure what I was expecting from Mr. Mercy, but I can tell you that I wasn’t expecting him to be either so corpulent or so ornery. Perhaps I simply encountered him at a particularly harried time. The holidays were looming, and I had to imagine that the man was under a great deal of pressure at that time of the year.
I had walked from the bus station to the agreed upon assignation, an old-fashioned dining car perched at the edge of the moldering downtown. I don’t suppose the town itself –the identity of which I was sworn not to disclose– had more than 10,000 residents, and I’d never heard of the place.
An additional condition of the meeting stipulated that Mr. Mercy would only consent to an audience between the hours of one and four a.m. Supplications, his assistant had told me, tended to be clearer and despair most concentrated during those early hours of the morning, and Mr. Mercy was “something of a night owl.” Surely, I was asked, I had heard of the “dark night of the soul”?
I found the diner virtually abandoned. There was a clearly inebriated and bickering younger couple at the counter, and the rotund man I rightfully surmised to be Mr. Mercy was seated alone in a booth at the back, where he was hunched intently over a plate of meat loaf and mashed potatoes, as well as a basket of French fries almost completely obscured under a liberal application of catsup.
“Mr. Mercy?” I asked tentatively as I stood before him. He presented an imposing and rather unattractive spectacle, crowded as he was into the booth, his girth straining against the tabletop.
He gestured with his fork without looking up. “Sit down,” he said, “and state your business.”
There was a brief and awkward moment of silence while I tried to compose myself and find the words I had been rehearsing in my head for many months.
“You’ll understand, I know, that I am a busy man,” Mr. Mercy said. “I must also warn you that I am seldom in the mood for small talk. Please state quickly and clearly the nature of the mercy you seek.”
I was exhausted from the long bus trip and rubbed my temples with my hands. When I looked up I found Mr. Mercy glowering at me across the table.
“Please, sir,” he said. “I am warning you. You have had, I should think, more than sufficient time to prepare for this meeting. I have limited time and patience for cat-and-mouse games, and I am not a mind reader.”
I looked into Mr. Mercy’s florid face. A napkin was tucked into the collar of his shirt, despite which gravy glistened in the deep creases of his jowls and there were beads of perspiration on his forehead. In contemplating this unappetizing spectacle I found my resolve.
“I have come, Mr. Mercy, to ask you to leave your wife,” I said.
The man looked as if he had been struck. He stared at me incredulously, his knife and fork poised in mid-air.
“You cannot be serious,” he eventually said. “What could you possibly know of the woman in question or of our great happiness together?”
“I have known your wife for a very long time,” I told him. “We lived together in a forest long, long ago. You will almost certainly make her life very miserable.”
“This is preposterous,” Mr. Mercy said. “And nothing could be further from the truth. Did you convey this information to my assistant? I am certain you did not, or this meeting would never have taken place. Let me assure you that my lovely wife is the apple of my eye and a constant source of pleasure. She is, I feel certain, the reward I have been given for my years of selfless service to humanity.”
“You cannot make her happy,” I said. “She deserves better.”
Mr. Mercy jabbed at me across the table with his knife.
“Deserves better? Deserves better than Mr. Mercy?” he said. “You, sir, are an impudent scoundrel! And I demand that you take your leave at once. Are you forgetting whom you are addressing? If I cannot give that divine woman the happiness she deserves then there is not a man alive who can. How dare you confront me with this nonsense!”
With great effort Mr. Mercy had risen halfway to his feet and was lunging at me with his butter knife. In a spasm of rage he hurled the remainder of his meatloaf dinner and struck me square in the chest. Several large and clearly menacing characters had materialized at our table and I was wrestled from the booth, dragged to the doorway, and flung out into the cold morning.
When I finally managed to regain my feet and dust myself off I pressed my face to the glass of the doorway and was unsurprised to discover that no one remained in the diner but the oblivious and bickering couple at the counter.
The booth in the back was now entirely empty. The table, in fact, had already been cleared, and there was no evidence whatsoever that Mr. Mercy had ever been there at all.
