Vernon pulled his head up, gasping, and looked into that dense, implacable face, painted onto that round dome-skull. Strong, imposing men had bare heads, Vernon knew. He wanted to genuflect before that bare head, beg it not to hurt him anymore. Then, as if sensing that Vernon was prostrating before it, that bare head lunged forward and smashed into Vernon’s nose, which was once something of structure but now emptied out like a stomped-upon balloon.
Through some miracle, Vernon landed flat on his back.
“Don’t you pass out, now. Queens Boulevard and 63rd Drive, tomorrow, noon. Be there, you piece of shit. You stupid ghetto piece of stupid raping shit. Be there.
“We won’t kill you or hurt you, I promise. We won’t. Don’t show up, and we will, we’ll kill you and everyone you know.”
Vernon’s breathing was wet and congested and the back of his throat tasted salty and metallic. He didn’t know how long he was out, but when he got to his feet, there were young boys on bikes staring at him from across the street, and a Middle Eastern bodega owner straining on his tiptoes to see what was going on, as if Vernon was on a ledge or something. Vernon got up, half-dazed, and spit up. He heard an excited, almost-goading “oh shit” from somewhere behind him, and heard someone nonsensically say “son got bodied for some Pop Tarts” and he heard laughing, but he didn’t care and lurched forward, stumbling until he was back in his dim apartment.
He pulled out ancient pepperoni Hot Pockets from the freezer and threw them in the microwave. He ate them and felt somehow unworthy of them. He left the cheese-caked encasement on the round table and made his way to the bathroom, where he recognized himself as something swollen and puffy but still himself. He may have brushed his teeth or dotted his face with water, but soon enough he was out of his clothes and collapsed on the bed.
>< >< ><
Vernon had befriended Kim-ly, so to speak, because she was pretty and there was something voluptuous about her. It was obvious she was pretty, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was that attracted him so strongly to her. What first attracted him were those lips. Her lips looked like a duck bill when closed, they were so big and rich, and her eyes were almond-shaped and her skin was pretty and clean and glowing. He wouldn’t and couldn’t describe it in these terms, but all her features spoke of a virile fecundity that made him turn his head and hunger, like imbibing the wafting scent of freshly-baking bread.
And, to think, all this came about from this clueless Asian woman tending to fruit in some shitty little corner stand a block-or-so from his project.
When he first spoke to her, he situated himself and spoke as if it didn’t matter how she responded: either way, he seemed to be suggesting, he was going to be a part of her life. He stood there, broad-shouldered, cocky, accentuating his New Yawk toughness, really emphasizing the heavy d in ‘water,’ and — this was so corny even he felt it was too much — ended their conversation by buying a single peach and biting into it luxuriantly like it was pure ambrosia.
He’d see her all the time — she always seemed to be working — and he’d help her out sometimes, bringing groceries back to her apartment, which was a two-bedroom apartment shared by four women. She’d nod and be effusively thankful, not saying or revealing much, just listening and saying she’d been in New York for three months and still wanted to visit the Statute of Liberty, and he’d sometimes laugh and she’d smile unknowingly, as if they were having a real conversation contingent upon what each person was saying to the other. All he knew was her name, that she was from Vietnam, that she had a husband-or-someone back home, and that she was probably here illegally, as anytime he recommended she go here-or-there to collect a benefit or get an I.D. she just coyly shook her head.
Once, he thought his lust for her had turned into love. Loving her would make no sense, since they had nothing in common other than that which everyone has in common, but love was supposed to be crazy, right? He’d noticed that the white T-shirt he was wearing was stained across the stomach with congealed strawberry jam, and he thought it looked like blood, and imagined, what if I were dying? This opened him up emotionally, and he looked up at her and she smiled unknowingly and she seemed to fill up that open space.
He came inside her and yelled his release loudly, to show his appreciation and make her feel better. She said nothing, just pivoted off the table and pulled her panties back on up under her skirt. Vernon was all endorphins, and kept looking at her like a solicitous dog, waiting for her to break out in smiles, as if his enthusiasm was contagious. She never did, and then Vernon’s enthusiasm curdled briefly into self-pity until it sparked into resentment, and he said “ok then, whud-ever,” and left, wishing he had some friends on hand to tell about the hot Vietnamese girl he’d finally bagged.
And after that one time, he didn’t hang out around that fruit stand much anymore, except maybe he’d peek in here and there. Over a long course of time, he’d noticed a trend: she was rarely there. He thought maybe she’d moved back to Vietnam or some shit, until one time the little Asian proprietor spotted him and, in that annoying Asian way, pointed a squat finger at him and said, “You! You! You, get out! You not allowed here.” Vernon made an arrogant, obnoxious face of dismissal, a loud “pshh,” like he was just too hood for this fruit stand. His stance and patois got more ghetto, he said something like “fine, faggot, I don’t need your fag shit,” and practically crip-walked out of there. He heard someone behind the counter mock-tauntingly, “ooh shit, there goes father of the year, scumbag,” and Vernon’s stomach lurched up, but he maintained his cavalier composure until he was back on the street.
Then a couple days after that incident, he stalked the fruit stand again and, running into a Hispanic employee, played the concerned citizen and asked about Kim-ly. The man nodded knowingly and pantomimed a swollen belly, and Vernon said “pregnant?” and the Hispanic smiled and nodded mischievously.
And the months passed and he continued working his intermittent construction jobs, all the while pretending to be getting away with something even though he knew she probably wasn’t looking for him and that she knew where he was if she wanted to find him, anyway. This fantasy of escape continued for a long time until, like a little boy tired of waiting to be found in hide-and-seek, he outed himself. He went to the fruit stand and asked another Hispanic if she still worked there — it could have been the same man who first told him she was pregnant, for all he knew — and the man just said, casually, “tomorrow,” like it was nothing at all. And he was there tomorrow, and so was she, next to a young tanned baby, being ooohed and ahhed over by an avuncular Asian man.
>< >< ><
Vernon woke up sometime around 10 a.m. He took a shit, showered, and made a quick breakfast of buttered toast and did some other chores. There was a weird interlude where he went about his day as if things were normal. He checked himself in the mirror and yeah, the area under his nose had a big rouge smudge like he cut himself shaving, but in a really, really bad way. And he peeked at the clock on the microwave and rushed out the door like he was still on one of those construction jobs, and his body implored “late!” and for a moment he forgot what he was running late for.
Then he was getting off the R train at 63rd Drive-Rego Park, wondering if this was the last time he’d pass through a turnstile.
Even though he made sure to get off on the southeast corner of the intersection — where he was pretty sure he was supposed to meet the Dutch guy — he spun around wildly once he got to the surface, afraid he’d somehow missed them. The last few days moved too rapidly for him to interrogate his thought process, but he either took the Dutch man at his word, or felt obliged to endure whatever punishment awaited him.
Even before he made out any faces, he knew: this was the group he was looking for. There were five men, all fairly tall, hovering around six foot, all in fairly good shape. Varying hues of white, from alabaster to olive to something approaching burnt sienna. He felt a ta
p on his shoulder that screamed “walk with us, buddy,” and he kept apace with the pack like a wayward fish rejoining its shoal.
“Glad you made it, Mr. Camacho.” He didn’t need to turn around to know that was the Dutchman. Odd, though, that he sounded genuine.
The pack all walked half a block down 63rd Drive before Vernon had any idea who was the leader. But all the group’s focus on one man — all the soft touches on the man’s wrist, someone pointing out a traffic signal to him, all the little nods appetent for praise — tipped Vernon off that the oldest gentleman, the one in the hat with the 360-degree brim, was the leader. Vernon’s hunch was confirmed when they arrived at their destination, a small outdoor cafe with a stubby, rectangular wood table set up for serving. The hatted man sat on the west side of the table, his back to the street. The others, the functionaries — a group that included the Dutchman — sat two or three along the northern and southern sides of the table, respectively. Vernon, the guest of honor, was granted the glory of sitting on the eastern side, his back to the restaurant. There were no other guests; in fact, there weren’t any other tables set up outside.
Vernon had miscounted, actually. There were six of them in total (seven if he counted himself), and the one he’d missed was definitely the odd man out. Of average height, brown, unkempt hair, a little disheveled and scrubby looking, could stand to lose 5-10 pounds, with a flabby chicken neck and a face made smooth with the extra cushion of flab. He wasn’t as engaged as the others, didn’t dote over the hatted man like the others, didn’t have the fierce battle-scarred determination of the others, and didn’t do much to make his presence felt. He avoided eye contact.
“It’s a nice day for this, at least,” said the hatted man. He was in his late thirties or early forties, fit, maybe even dashing, if dressed the right way. Vernon half-expected to see the functionaries staring at him expectantly when he failed to immediately respond to the hatted-man’s comment. He braced himself for one of the more goonish functionaries to slap him hard on the back and bark “say something!,” or maybe even something as dunderheaded as “when the boss speaks, you answer!” But the goons at the table looked like normal guys, for the most part, and instead of cradling their guns in anticipation, they looked rigid and maybe even annoyed. The hatted-man, Vernon surmised, would never say “annoyed”; he’d say “peeved” or some fancy shit like that.
“So, I’ll make this brief, Mr. Camacho. Let me just state from the outset that, as you can imagine, we don’t do this, ever. By that,” he chuckled a bit, “I mean we don’t, ahh, usually talk, informally, with the type of people, like you, who we deal with.”
“And what, exactly, type of people is you talking about?” Vernon spat out the question in his usual default hood insouciance, as if that flying Dutchman hadn’t beaten the moxie out of him less than 24 hours ago.
The Dutchman leaned in, smirk hidden behind his arm.
“Well, rapists, Vernon. You know that by now. You aren’t stupid, despite your … unfortunate diction.
“There are degrees of rape, of course. The violent street rapist is, of course, the worst. The date rapist: still terrible, but not as terrible. We don’t say ‘better.’ Still awful, just not as awful.
“Our question is zero-sum. Rapist, or not a rapist. You are a rapist, although your crime was not as awful as most we’ve dealt with. In fact, your crime, I can say with only slight hesitation, is the least awful rape we’ve dealt with. Which is one of the reasons I’ve decided to talk with you.”
Vernon’s taut mouth and stone-cold glare served as objections to this characterization.
“Don’t, Vernon, don’t,” he breathed heavily, “don’t, look, we know you’re a rapist. We know it, you know it, look,” and on the hard ‘k’ on ‘look,’ Vernon caught a hint of the fast-talking New York shyster he was talking to. “Look, I already said your crime was the least awful crime we’ve dealt with.”
“I didn’t commit any crime like that. I wasn’t in jail for rape.”
The hatted-man gave him a hard stare. “Don’t get smart with me. You know what I meant.”
As if to shut Vernon up, the hatted-man continued. “You had sex with her once, didn’t you. Ever think about that? You had sex with her once, and you conceived. Never struck you as odd?
“Did you know that sexual intercourse from rape is almost three times more likely to result in conception than voluntary sexual cohabitation?” Breaking out statistics, the quickening pace of his speech, the use of that curiously prim term ‘sexual cohabitation’: Vernon felt that this was the beginning of a speech that’d been rehearsed before.
“Some ignorant people think rape is about ‘power.’ That’s a fashionable idea. Popular on college campuses. Complete nonsense. That’s like saying bank robberies are undertaken because it’s an opportunity to use guns. No, bank robbery is obviously about getting otherwise unobtainable money. Likewise, rape is a way to spread the seed. Either ‘trading up’ — getting a woman of greater genetic worth, also known as getting a girl ‘out of your league,’ or, in more desperate cases, allowing a man otherwise shut out from the evolutionary sweepstakes to put in a bid.” The hatted-man smiled. One of the minions at the table swayed and nodded his head nonchalantly, as if keeping rhythm with a familiar song.
“Let me ask you a question, Vernon. When you went off to jail … you went off to jail for armed robbery, correct? During the time you found yourself in such desperate straits that you needed to commit armed robbery … you know what I bet you did all day? I bet you jerked off a whole bunch. I bet you jerked off a whole bunch after you got that first letter we sent you, too.
“How do I know that? Because you were nervous and desperate. And desperate men are horny men. Did you know that a man is more likely to cheat on his wife after he loses his job? Makes no sense, right?
“Wrong! Because a desperate man is a man who recognizes his sinking social status. His subconscious is telling his body: it’s do-or-die time. The seed needs to be spread before all hope is lost. That’s why spousal rape, as it is now called, occurs so frequently after the man gets laid off from work.
“You think you’re in control, Vernon. You’re not, not at all. Think about it! Think about it! What are the odds that you got Kim-ly pregnant on the first and only time you had sex with her? Did your body know you were raping her?”
Their server brought them all coffee and water right when the hatted-man said “did your body know you were raping her.” The server continued serving, nonplussed.
“Thank you, Jackson. And you … you, Vernon. You are interesting to me, I’ll grant you that.
“You haven’t even asked me anything regarding your son. Your son, remember? Your son, the son we killed, Vernon. Remember that?”
He said these final words in the same timbre as his earlier exegesis on the roots of rape.
Vernon leaned in and rubbed his hands together. “About that.” What could he say?
He’d been tormented by feelings of parental inadequacy, of shame, of not even having a family history of abandonment to pin the blame on. He’d had nightmares of meeting his son in his pre-teens and finding him to be some skinny pussy-boy Asian faggot, getting knocked around the schoolyard and taunted for having a tiny little yellow pimple-for-a-dick. He’d had other dreams, alternative scenarios of shame: meeting his son when his son was older and in school for medicine or something, his son talking modestly about math or science or something, real casually, like it was nothing, leaving Vernon wishing he could explain that he too was smart, in his way, but his stuttering, simple language betraying any of his claims to profundity.
“About that, son,” Vernon started, cringing in hot embarrassment, “you really think nothing going to happen to you?”
“No, I don’t care about that. I wanted you to ask why we did it.”
“Listen, you faggot.”
“Please Vernon, don’t act l
ike that. We thought you were different.” Vernon sensed someone shaking his head.
“I don’t understand your thinking, Vernon. Are you trying to threaten us? We outnumber you. We’re armed, you’re not. We obviously know where you live, we knew how to get to you in prison. We could have killed you there, if we wanted to. We have … partners whose powers you can’t even conceive of.” The hatted man turned to the chubbier out-of-place guy and pointed with his thumb. “He can vouch for that,” and one of the other men hit the chubby guy on the back affectionately, almost to rouse him up, but the chubby guy still kept his gaze askance.
“Please don’t disappoint me, Vernon. I wanted you to ask why we did it. Someone, fill in for Vernon. He’s not being helpful. Someone, ask me why we did this.”
The other men around the table laughed while Vernon continued rubbing his palms, like a tough guy about to get his hands dirty.
“Why’d you do it, you bastard!” one of his minions play-acted.
“How could you, you monster!” another chimed in.
“Because,” and now the hatted man betrayed his zealousness with a smile, “because, we had to. If we’d let him live, we’d be allowing rape to win, right? How is it that scum like you somehow instinctively learned to target the religious, the believers in shame, those who won’t abort? Most pregnancies from rape end in abortion, certainly, but somehow, instinctively, you guys are getting better and better at making sure your seed lives on.
“Well, not anymore.”
“You murderer!” another yelled in mock-horror.
“Yes, yes, it was terrible, as murder is. And yes, we are very sorry for that, although, of course, if you hadn’t committed a terrible act, then we’d never need to commit our terrible act.
“It really doesn’t matter. You are not the first, and you will not be the last, so what of it? Your son’s survival was, prime facie, a tacit acceptance of the very premise for which we stand against: the proliferation and success of the act of rape. In other words, ceding to the moral demand to let your son live would be acquiescing to, on a biological level, the most ruthless and insidious crime. Ruthless, for obvious reasons, yet insidious, because by its very terms it takes moral hostage over the wicked fruit of its labor. The goal of rape is to spread the seed, and allowing the seed to flourish — for whatever supposed moral reason — surrenders to rape its only sought-after goal. Although, I should add, we are experimenting with new tactics,” he said, with an implied nod-and-wink.
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