Kill the Silence

by Monika Korra

  That impression was broken by the sound of another voice.

  “I’m a police officer, ma’am, and I’m here to help,” it said.

  “I don’t believe you. I don’t know who you are,” I said. “I want to speak to a woman. Stay away.”

  Still looking at the ground, I saw a shaft of light twitch to my right and then move off. I looked up and followed the spotlight up to a circling helicopter. The distant whup of its rotors was soon joined by sirens and more flashing lights.

  For the first time, I began to cry. I looked up; above the helicopter, a sliver of moon and a few stars lightened the night sky. Through my tears the lights flickered and brightened. Shoulders quaking, I let my arms dangle at my side, felt the tension leaching from my body with each heaving sob.

  This wasn’t the night I was supposed to die.

  “I’m Officer Shivers. James Shivers. You’re safe now.”

  I nodded dumbly. Another man approached, holding out a coat to me. I nodded again, and he draped the coat around my shoulders. He stepped back and just stood there while I nestled inside it.

  “Thank you.”

  I looked up at him, and he met my eyes briefly and nodded.

  “No need for that.” I could tell that he was struggling to figure out what to say. “My pleasure” or even just a simple “You’re welcome” somehow wouldn’t have seemed right.

  Officer Shivers led me toward the police car. There, another policeman, this one dressed in a uniform, approached.

  I eyed him suspiciously.

  “We’d like to ask you some questions about what happened. Why don’t you take a seat?”

  He gestured toward the car. I saw the mesh grillwork that separated the sets of seats, the guns in the passenger seat.

  I pursed my lips and shook my head.

  “No. Not in there.”

  I saw another officer whisper in the ear of the man who had spoken to me.

  “I understand. It’s cold out here. We want you to be comfortable. I’m sure you want to help us find these men. We need your help to do that.”

  I considered that for a moment and took a tentative step toward the car. With each step it was if my adrenal glands went further into action. I felt my pulse quicken, the lobes of my ears grow warm; my vision sharpened, and all I could see were the weapons the officers wore.

  Eventually, I was able to take control of my mind and my body. I allowed a paramedic to examine me. I reached up and felt the tape in my hair. I looked at him pleadingly, but he shook his head and gestured toward where the police were standing. I was going to have to stay exactly as I had been for the last two hours for a while longer. My face felt numb and swollen, and I heard a high-pitched hollow ringing in my ears.

  When the man’s gloved hand touched my chin and my cheek to tilt my head back, I flinched and shut my eye against the light he shined into it.

  “Sorry,” he said. Again, as with the second officer, something about his tone and his demeanor let me know he thought that his choice of words was inadequate. “I think we’ll leave the tape on for a while. I’d hate to mess your hair up.”

  He tilted his head toward me, moved it from side to side. He spent the rest of his time examining my head, shining a light in my eyes, asking me to follow the beam from side to side. I had to answer questions about my name, the date, where and when I was born. I kept telling them that I was fine. All the time I was thinking that I wanted to go back to where the men had dropped me off—the area hadn’t been familiar to me, and if we waited too long to return there, I’d forget how to reach it.

  “We just want to be sure that you’re not hurt,” one of the paramedics told me. That was obvious enough, and I asked to be allowed to speak to someone in charge.

  Finally, one of the uniformed police officers came over, and I pleaded with him to let me take them back to the site. Now, mostly assured that these people were here to help me, I climbed into the back of the police car. I guided them to the intersection of Barry Avenue and Upshur Street, close to where I’d been dropped off. As we drove there, they asked me a few questions about what the men looked like, and I did the best I could to answer. They asked me about my cell phone, and I told them that after I’d been pushed out of the van one of them came after me to take it away.

  My head was spinning at that point, and I only wondered briefly why my cell phone mattered to the police. I knew it mattered to me. The idea of those men having access to me and to my friends and family soured my stomach. I felt like I did after a hot summer workout, as if my head were floating above my body, unconnected to what it was experiencing. I recognized that I was feeling dehydrated—it had been hours since I’d had anything to drink. I sat in the car while the policemen were busy. They next drove me past the house where the party had been. I didn’t want to look up to see if the lights were still on, if the partygoers were still at it. The contrast between then and now felt too severe.

  We drove on to the hospital. I sat in the backseat and watched as the lights of other cars and the passing buildings flickered by. After a few minutes, the sound of the police radio turned into white noise, no different from the sound of the wind rushing past the window I leaned my head against, the thrum of the tires. I felt a strange calm come over me at that point. I saw myself as if looking down from above—a small blond girl in an oversized coat and a rumpled dress, barefoot and shivering. Yet she was smiling. I knew why. She’d made it. I’d made it. The images that had flickered now seemed to have slowed. I was bathed in light for longer and longer periods of time. I could see that my face was slightly swollen and bruises colored my otherwise pale skin. Still, the face was mine, recognizable to me.

  I didn’t have a choice about what had been done to me, but I could choose what happened next. I hadn’t been killed. I couldn’t begin to formulate an idea of what would happen next, but I was alive. Whether I lived or died had briefly and frighteningly been out of my hands. Now I was once again in control, and I loved how that felt.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Tomorrow

  Those good feelings lasted as long as it took me to walk from the ambulance and into the emergency room of the Parkland Memorial Hospital. Two policemen escorted me down a dimly lit hallway. A few chairs sat in rows facing a television set that dangled from the ceiling. The screen’s illumination puddled on the worn floor. Even at that hour, several people sat in the waiting room. Their eyes grew wide at the sight of me. I tried to turn my back to them. I smelled something sharp and ammonia-like, and it stirred in me some distant and indistinct memory. I couldn’t identify the source of that new anxiety. I’d always had good doctors back at home and had little fear of needles or anything like that.

  A lone woman sat behind a high counter. She looked at me briefly before turning away. She slid a clipboard to me across the counter. A pen slithered along with it, then leaped over the edge, held in midair by its tiny ball chain.

  “Fill these out. Make sure you check both sides. Sign here and here.” She slashed an X on each of the pages.

  The pen swung back and forth. I clumsily grabbed at it, my muscles still numb from the cold and exhausted by my exertions and sleep deprivation.

  One of the officers led me through a set of swinging doors and into a long hallway. A pair of chairs sat side by side. I pulled the coat as tight around me as possible and set the clipboard in my lap. I wondered if something was wrong with my eyes. The printing on the pages was blurred. I realized then that my legs were twitching involuntarily. I watched almost fascinated as my quadriceps rippled like tiny waves.

  The patient intake form asked for the usual information. Name. Address. Phone number. I knew the answers, but I felt like I was trying to write them down with the handle of a broom. I could barely sense the feel of the pen against my skin, and I watched as its top spun and staggered while I scrawled my answers in a script that was unfamiliar to my own eyes.

  Then I reached the question asking the reason for my visit to the ER, and it was as
if no language I spoke could help me. Somehow, writing down the word “rape” made everything that I’d fought so hard to that point to survive inescapable, permanent. I don’t know if it would have been any easier to speak that word to someone else than to write it down, or if it was just my frozen clumsiness, but of all the words I had to write, that one came out the least legible.

  I stopped looking at the forms to ask what I’d asked of the police. “Can you please call my friends? I need to see them.”

  The officer who’d been with me had been replaced by a man in plainclothes, a detective.

  “Not just yet. We’ll get them here. They have some work to do, too.”

  I wondered at that; what work would they be doing? And was what I was doing now some kind of work as well? Was that all this was for everyone, some kind of job?

  I took a deep breath to compose myself. I did, in fact, have a job to do. I had to get this form filled out. Then, I hoped, I would be taken to some place where I could warm myself and clean myself up. Along with wanting to see my friends again, I was overwhelmed by the desire to brush my teeth. The thought of having that man in my mouth sickened me.

  I leaned over to rest my elbows on my thighs and tackle the rest of the questions. I looked past the form and saw my feet. They weren’t quite as bone-pale as the rest of me; they had become splotched with red, as if because I had developed some kind of rash and not just because my blood was only now able to leave my core to heat my limbs. As I finished the forms, I could feel the pinprick sensation of my fingers and toes thawing. The familiar sensations reminded me of home.

  I had to push that thought away. I didn’t want to think of my parents. I glanced at the clock. It was four in the morning here. That meant that my parents were about halfway through their workdays. I tried to picture them, my mother at her desk reviewing papers, with a cup of black coffee beside her; my mechanical engineer father sitting in front of a machine, squinting as he diagnosed a problem. My father was one of the handiest men I knew, whether it was one of our cars, an appliance at home—he could fix anything. I used to think that he could speak to machines, get them to tell him what ailed them. I wondered if how I was now broken was something he could sense and help with.

  “Did you notice any distinguishing scars or marks on the man—” The detective stopped. I thought maybe he recognized my look of frustration. I didn’t want to answer any questions at that point. I wanted someone to be with me and comfort me.

  I was wrong. The detective looked at his notebook and continued, “…the man you called ‘the Boss.’ ”

  “They called him the Boss.”

  “The Boss, then. Anything striking about him.”

  It took me a moment to fully understand what he meant by “striking.”

  I sat with my elbow on the chair’s armrest and closed my eyes trying to picture the Boss; instead all I could do was feel the frozen tips of my fingers against my temple, how my hand shook and vibrated my skull.

  “I didn’t really see him. The other two kept telling me not to look at him.”

  This pattern continued. I tried to fill out the forms, wondering what I could possibly put in place of a Social Security number. How could I explain in that little blank that I wasn’t from the U.S., didn’t have that number, and had now lost whatever sense of security I might have once possessed. I also didn’t have my phone. I’d never been good with memorizing people’s phone numbers. I always relied on my phone for that. Even now, if I wanted to call Kristine or Viktoria or George, I wouldn’t be able to. I gave the police their full names and hoped that they could get the numbers.

  I needed someone’s assurance that I was safe, that I was going to be okay, that someone understood at least a little bit what I was going through.

  I’d just finished the paperwork and handed it to an officer when I heard a woman’s voice. “Are you cold?”

  I looked up. A woman in a blue nurse’s uniform stood in front of me. Her eyes were kind and framed by blond hair the color of my own. She didn’t smile at me, but her expression revealed her concern.

  My lip quivered and I tried to speak, but I couldn’t get the words out. Instead I just dropped my eyes to my lap and sat there with my fingers working as if they could form the words my mouth could not.

  “How about if I get you a blanket?”

  “Please. Yes,” I said, watching as she strode away from me, alternately brightening and dimming as she passed beneath the fluorescent light fixtures. I sat in silence, the hum of the bulbs above me a raspy static.

  The woman reappeared. Instead of just handing the blankets to me—she’d brought two—she held them spread open to me. Like a small child stepping out of the bath into her mother’s swaddling arms, I stepped into the blankets and the woman’s embrace. She closed her arms around me, and the two of us stood there entangled in something that we both understood was needed, if we hadn’t said exactly why.

  I started to cry then, sobbing spasms that tore at my throat, tears of sadness, gratitude, and fear. Her arms stayed wrapped around me, offering me the first real bit of comfort I’d experienced since the man had offered me his coat. Then I experienced a moment of panic.

  “This coat,” I said. The woman released me and I stepped back. “How will I get it back to him?”

  Confusion flickered briefly across her face.

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” she said. She lifted the edge of the blankets like a bride’s train so that I could sit again. I brought my feet up onto the chair and sat hugging my legs, trying to restore some warmth and feeling.

  “It’s not mine. The jacket—” I managed to speak those words calmly, but then it was as if I were back in that SUV going through it all again. Words and tears came out of me in a torrent. I had no idea if I was making sense. It was as if I was vomiting up the entire experience, trying to purge myself of any of its foul poisons. The nurse sat with me, alternately holding my hand and leaning in to squeeze my shoulders. In the absence of my friends, this woman helped me hold myself together until they could arrive. I thought again of Robin and so desperately wanted to be in touch with him; that pain was worse than any physical discomfort I experienced.

  The nurse, whose name I forgot almost as soon as she told me, listened until I had calmed myself again. My breathing returned to normal and my crying stopped.

  “Listen, Monika, you’re going to be all right.” She held my hand and knelt in front of me, nodding, her eyes locked on mine. “I know it. I can see how strong you are. I have other patients that I have to see. But I’ll be back.” I knew it was my mind playing tricks on my body, but as soon as she left, shivers again overtook me.

  I sat there wondering what was next. All I wanted to do was to see my friends and go home.

  I looked at the clock. It was now 4:30. I asked the detectives again if I could call Robin. The two of them looked at each other, and the older one, a bald man with Vandyke facial hair, finally nodded his approval. He handed me his phone and I dialed the number, anticipation rising from my belly to my head. All I heard was the ringing on the other end. A dozen possibilities of where he might be ran through my head. Robin could be a very sound sleeper. I knew he’d been exhausted from studying so much. I shut my eyes and pictured him in his room, sleeping, as he did, sprawled across it, one arm tucked beneath his chest. In my mind, I was there with him, nudging him gently, watching as his eyelids fluttered and then opened, his expression a mix of surprise and pleasure, a smile spreading across his lips like curtains parting. Early-morning sunlight sliced through the blinds and the smell of coffee warmed the room.

  I let the phone ring and ring but left no message. How awful would it be for him to hear a disembodied voice saying those words, asking for help, letting him know the hours of agony he’d not been there for?

  Someone from the hospital, another person in quiet shoes and what seemed to me to be pajamas and a robe, stepped around the corner, and my vision of Robin disappeared. The person indicated that we should fol
low. I shuffled along in my blanket cocoon. The room the person led us to was windowless and cramped. A chair and an examination table sat opposite each other. A basin and a small cabinet lined another wall. That same ammonia-like smell I’d sensed when I first came into the hospital reached my nostrils. I sat in the chair, trying not to look at the table.

  Two men, strangers to me, resumed asking me questions about what the three men had done to me, their voices indifferent, clinical, asking me where and how and how many times. They used textbook words and the tone I’d imagine someone taking inventory at a clothing store might use to come up with a tally. I just wanted the voices to stop, so I answered the questions, though it seemed to me that I’d already told them everything so many times before. A lengthy pause was filled by the sound of footsteps, more than one person, talking and then a quick laugh. A moment later, a doctor stepped into the room.

  She introduced herself, but it was just syllables and sounds to me. She began an explanation of what she was going to be doing with me. She pointed to the examination bed and said that I could lie down. I did, wrapping myself up in a blanket, finally feeling some warmth. She’d only just started when a knock at the door stopped her. Another investigator sidestepped into the room. He held a camera out. I shed the blankets and stood as he took photographs of me from various angles, stepping toward and away from me, standing, squatting. The flashes jabbed at my eyes, and I flinched each time.

  It seemed as if he paid particular attention to the duct tape that still clung to my neck and hair. I felt as if I was a package that had arrived damaged, partially torn open, and visual evidence was necessary to be granted a refund of some kind.

  When he was done, the woman picked up where she had left off. Finally she asked me, “May I begin the examination now?”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t sure just what was required of me or what she was stating was going to happen to me.