Kill the Silence

by Monika Korra

  Her eyes flickered from mine to the one detective who remained in the room.

  “Even if you choose not to prosecute, to go forward, it is a good idea to have evidence collected. I’ll also be examining you to see if you’ve sustained any injuries. Do you understand?”

  I told her yes. I couldn’t have guessed how thoroughly I was going to be probed.

  I stood on a section of examination table paper and awaited further instructions. After removing my dress, I was asked to place it in a paper bag. I was told that would avoid contamination. I knew what the word meant but didn’t fully grasp how it applied in this case. I hadn’t thought at all about potentially being exposed to disease. I was so out of it, I wasn’t even thinking clearly about it being used as evidence.

  Once I was outfitted with a paper gown, the general examination began. The woman’s voice led me through the process, but I wasn’t hearing much or even feeling much at all as she checked each of my limbs. She startled me a bit when her face popped up in front of mine and I watched her gaze narrow as she stared at my mouth and face. I flinched when she asked me to spread my thighs and shined a light there. She swabbed across my genitals and anus with some liquid that had me back shivering from cold or fear or both.

  I tried to picture myself back home, running through the woods, the smell of pine and grass and the feel of sunshine on my face. Every time I was just about there, something invaded—the tug of a comb through my pubic hair, the speculum inserted into me, questions asked about ejaculation, terms like “motility” and “staining.”

  When I sensed that she was just about through with me, I finally said what was most on my mind at that point: “I need to take a shower. Please, can I take a shower?” I felt so dirty. My skin crawled with the feeling of the sweat and smells and fluids of these men all over me. It was a deep disgust that I was desperate to rid myself of. They were still on me.

  “Not yet,” the examiner said. “There’s still more testing to do. You can take a shower when you get home.”

  “Please,” I begged, clasping my hands together. “I feel so sick.”

  “It won’t be too long,” she said.

  “Can’t you get one of my friends here to sit with me?”

  She referred me to the policemen in the hallway, who again told me that my friends had to stay at the police station for now, and that they had tried to call Robin but couldn’t get through.

  “Then call one of my other friends!” I said. “Call someone else from my school. I want someone I trust here with me.”

  “It’s the middle of the night—”

  “Someone will answer.”

  I had no idea how loud or shrill my voice was. It was as if my emotions were like little children running around the room, occasionally and randomly making contact with the others and me.

  As angry as I was with the police for not meeting my request, I was frustrated with myself for not having those numbers memorized. In Norway, phone numbers have eight digits paired in four groups of two. The ten digits and the three-three-four grouping in the United States made no sense to me. Keeping contact information stored in my phone gave me one less thing to have to worry about. Now I was lying on my back staring up at the ceiling, clusters of digits floating around me, and me unable to grab them and put them in their proper order. I blamed myself for not having adapted better, but learning the language was hard enough.

  The university’s offices were still all closed, Robin was asleep, my friends were still at the police station answering questions, and I was lying there in a thin hospital gown—the paper one had been exchanged for a faded cloth one—feeling as much like a prisoner as I was a victim. I couldn’t stop shaking. I wasn’t allowed to leave, not allowed to wash off, not allowed to make a phone call, forced to fill out an endless array of paperwork that I didn’t understand, forced to wait around in a cold room for hours so I could be poked and prodded and questioned some more. I couldn’t stop shaking.

  When the doctors stepped out and left me alone in the room, I heard several of the policemen in the hallway laughing. At first I was furious, wondering how anyone in that circumstance could find anything funny at all. Logically, I knew that these men were doing their jobs, that they were at work, but still I felt my cheeks and ears burning with anger. I told myself that that response wasn’t going to do me any good. Instead, I had to use that anger to get through this thing. I needed focus and energy, and being upset was something I could use to my advantage. I’d been in shock for hours, if not physically then at least emotionally. I took it as a good sign that something had awakened me from that state.

  Eventually, someone from the Physical Evidence Unit came to “collect” the duct tape from my hair. I’m normally not particularly vain, but at that point, with every other humiliation and frustration that I’d suffered, each snip of the scissors and the sound of my hair being placed in a plastic bag nearly made me lose my composure completely. I gritted my teeth and shut my eyes while my legs twitched and bounced, wanting to carry me away. I had to remind myself that in the end, this was all going to be worth it. I’d be able to go back to doing what I loved, running and competing, hanging out with my friends, being a part of the team. This was like a workout. Painful but necessary. All part of attaining a larger goal. I had to dig deep. Digging. That’s what we’d always been told, finding something inside ourselves the extent of which maybe we didn’t even know existed. I’d been doing that my whole life.

  Sitting there, watching a small vial fill up with blood, I wondered what else was going to be taken from me that night. I couldn’t stop now. I had to tap into who I was at my core, keep my eyes fixed on those points near and far. That’s how I was raised.

  In Norway, kids grow up with outdoor sports almost from birth. Parents pull their kids in sleds until they can walk, and once their balance develops sufficiently, the toddlers are fitted with skis right away. My older sister became a runner, soccer player, and cross-country skier in her youth. I followed in her footsteps. As we got older, Anette came to love yoga and meditation and singing and dancing, and focused more of her attention on those activities while I became even more dedicated to the pursuit of medals, ribbons, and lower and lower times in races. Skiing was my main sport. I loved being able to propel myself at great speed, leg kicks and arm thrusts overcoming the snow’s friction, its seeming desire to hold me back.

  I started running at the age of fifteen, and I didn’t like it at first. I felt clumsy and awkward, missed the sensation of a single glide eating up meters of distance. I competed in races over the summer just as a way to train and stay in shape for ski season, but I soon fell in love with running for its own sake. Before long, I was competing in both about equally.

  My coaches had suggested that it was time to choose one or the other, but that didn’t make it easier. I loved both. My high school in Norway was a special school for students who hoped to become professional athletes. We studied all the basic academic subjects, but with a sports angle wherever possible, and with plenty of time during the day to train in our respective sports and to learn more about how to train. Because I hoped to make the Olympic team one day, I took my sport very seriously. I was accustomed to running in the mountains or through the woods on nature trails. That’s how it was at home; people didn’t run along sidewalks or in the streets, alongside cars. Part of the joy was the feeling of communing with nature.

  One day in 2008, as I walked in the door after riding home from school on my scooter, my mother came running over, talking so quickly that I couldn’t get a grip on what she was saying. Someone had called and it was something about running—that much I got, but the rest of it was just high-pitched, excited chirps.

  “Slow down, Mom,” I said. I took off my coat and asked her to explain it again.

  “Magne called.”

  I recognized the name immediately. Magne trained many elite runners in Norway, including Silje Fjørtoft. I’d idolized Silje for a while now. She was one of the top f
emale runners in the country, and I’d followed her career closely. Her times were always improving, and I knew that some of her success had to do with having Magne as her coach.

  “He just got back from Dallas,” my mother said, her smile widening, “He was visiting Silje, and he said she’s having such a good time at Southern Methodist University. Well, they’ve been talking all about you at the school, following your race results on the Internet, and they want to offer you a scholarship!”

  My mother looked at me mischievously, and I stood there staring back at her blankly.

  I hadn’t really considered going to the U.S. on a scholarship before. I knew that Silje had moved to Dallas, but I didn’t really understand that she was there to run and had her tuition paid for. In Norway, no college athletic programs or athletic scholarships existed. The only way for me to continue running in my college years was through a club team, separate from the university. I had already applied to a university in Oslo as a Physical Therapy major, something that would be an extension of my life as an athlete. But this opportunity in Dallas would mean that I could study and run, with all of my costs covered. I didn’t have any doubts—it was the chance of a lifetime, and I wouldn’t let it pass me by.

  After the first phone call with the coaches at SMU, I looked up the school’s website. I regretted not studying my English more diligently, but the photos on the site told me all that I needed to know. I saw a mix of old and new architecture, some buildings that looked like they could have been the capitol, their columns and façades reminding me of the National Theatre or the university in Oslo. I loved winter and I knew that Dallas was in Texas, in the southern part of the country and that it would be warm, but I’d always have snow and home.

  What made me absolutely certain I wanted to go were the photos of the athletic facilities there—the amazing track, the enormous weight rooms, trails to run on at White Rock Lake.

  A few doubts crept in. I knew I was a good runner and I had placed well in competitions, but I was not yet elite. I called back Magne and kept him on the phone for about an hour, just making sure that this was all real and that he wasn’t confusing me with a different runner. I could hear the laughter in Magne’s voice as he tried to assure me. We went on talking, and like the barrier I’d jump in the steeplechase, the conversation changed each time I asked again and again, “Really? You’re sure?” My parents had told me my whole life that hard work paid off. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe them, but I couldn’t believe that it could pay off in such a huge way.

  Dave Wollman, the head coach of SMU’s track-and-field team, called a few days later to confirm the offer. It would be the same scholarship that Silje had gotten: 100 percent tuition coverage for all four years. I could barely contain my excitement. Me? Little Monika from Løten, Norway? Were they sure they had the right person? They’d had good experiences with other Norwegian runners and they wanted to “invest” in me, he said. Like most Americans, he was adept at using big words and fancy phrases that I didn’t yet understand. When I did open my mouth, I was tongue-tied—both from joy and because of my broken English. I have no idea what Dave thought of me on that first phone call; I imagine he was thinking that I might be a good runner, but not the smartest young woman ever to attend the school. I had no way to respond when he told me that he was glad that I was going to be a Mustang, other than to say, “Yes. You also.”

  I trained even harder in preparation and had the best season ever that summer. I competed in the European Cup, the Norwegian Championships, and the Junior World Championships, and that was a very big deal for me. In the Norwegian Championships I even earned a medal. I tried not to think about how much I would miss Anette and my mother and father. I was going to be able to do something that I loved, but I wasn’t sure what it would be like to be so far away from those I loved. I told myself that in a way you had to be selfish to be successful as a runner.

  In mid-August, I had a farewell party with my friends, and then, on the last day before I left, I just wanted to be with my family. It had suddenly become real that I was about to fly to another country; I wouldn’t be able to come home on weekends whenever I wanted.

  It’s just for one year, I told myself. That’s all you’re committing to. Then, after the year is over, you can decide if you want to stay.

  As the day of my departure neared, I grew more anxious about my clothes. Everything I knew about the U.S. I’d gotten from watching television and the movies and reading on the Internet. In some ways, I felt like the young woman from Gilmore Girls, one of my favorite TV shows. Rory was a small-town girl like me, and she wound up going to Yale, meeting all kinds of people from backgrounds far removed from her own. Except she had very wealthy grandparents, so she never seemed to have to worry about how her sense of fashion would help her fit in with everyone else. I didn’t have any clothes with fancy labels or logos, unless you counted my mountain gear from Bergans of Norway.

  My mother tried to reassure me. “Oh, Monika. You’ll be fine,” she’d say and hug me. “Wear your new gold Nike running shoes. They’re unique and will make you stand out.”

  Standing out wasn’t what I wanted to do at all, but it was hard to explain all of that to her. Still, I packed them along with the rest of my things and hoped for the best. I was so anxious and excited the night before I left that adrenaline kept me up late. I lay in bed and flipped through a photo book that Anette had given me a few days earlier, before she and her boyfriend Jonas had returned to Trondheim. The pictures were of the two of us, from the time we were very young until just days before. In most of them we were smiling and acting goofy, huge smiles plastered on our faces. She wrote about how much she appreciated who I was and what I’d meant to her all these years. That she admired me for taking this chance meant the most to me, and I would miss Anette the most. Before I fell asleep, I tucked the book into my carry-on bag. I knew that I would want it with me on the flight over.

  We all did our usual best and avoided crying as we said our good-byes at the airport. Hours later, in the air somewhere over the North Atlantic, Greenland came into view, a white expanse against all that blue. I was flying with Silje and had so many questions that I wanted to ask her, but I really couldn’t bring myself to ask them. It all seemed so silly, so childlike, to wonder about clothes and food, about whether or not to raise your hand in a class, how to dial a phone number back home to someone in Norway. I sat there listening to Pink’s song “Stupid Girls” and vowed that I wasn’t going to let the experience change me. I was going to be myself, something that my parents had always encouraged me to do, and trust that I would be okay.

  The only thing I really asked Silje to do for me was to help me pronounce the English word for the track event I was going to specialize in.

  With my headphones back on and the eastern U.S. below me, I kept whispering, “I am here to run the steeplechase” over and over again.

  The track coach sent along one of my new teammates to pick us up from the airport. As we drove away, I was amazed by the streams of cars traveling in both directions, the tall buildings, and the absence of ranches and cows. Our driver was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and what seemed like winter boots—fur-lined and clunky. I thought I’d be able to fit in, though I didn’t think that kind of footwear was for me. I couldn’t believe that the campus was more like a city than I’d imagined, and when I saw other students climbing out of what seemed to me to be incredibly expensive cars, I was shocked to see that no one was dropping them off—those were their cars. They were college kids and they had cars.

  When I got to my room, I took out Anette’s book, put it on my desk like it was framed, hung up a Norwegian flag, and tried to make the other photos I had of family and friends cover as much of the rest of the space as possible. As more and more students arrived, I saw just how little I had been able to squeeze into that single suitcase. Students had television sets, microwaves, and they decorated their rooms to look like smaller versions of what their homes must hav
e been like. Mine looked like what it was: a small and modest place where a young woman was staying temporarily until she figured out if she fit in and if the reality matched her expectations.

  —

  I COULDN’T HELP but think of the hospital room I was in now in connection with my first dormitory space. They were both relatively drab and confining. The language barrier prevented me from being able to communicate what I needed, and standing out as being so different from everyone else, on top of trying to figure out what they were saying to me, as well as to one another, was difficult.

  At the conclusion of my exam, the doctor said I could get changed—but I had nothing to change into. My dress had been seized as evidence, and I didn’t even have underwear or shoes to put on.

  What am I going to do? Walk out of here in my hospital gown?

  I added that to my list of unasked questions.

  I couldn’t be sure if I had fallen asleep during my exam, but there was another man in the room. Short and dark-skinned, he spoke with an accent that I couldn’t identify. He flipped through a series of papers and looked at me, his eyes seemingly sliced in half by a pair of frameless lenses. I had the sense that he was picking up mid-sentence when he said, “…liver function normal.”

  He paused and then focused on something on his pant leg. He scowled at it and then stood and went to the basin. He ran some water and dabbed at his pants.

  When he approached me again, he took a pad out of the pocket of his lab coat. “Levonorgestrel. Point seven five milligrams twice twelve hours apart. Wait no more than three days.”

  He went on, but the only words that I paid real attention to were “emergency” and “contraceptive.”

  He paused and cocked his head to one side. At that angle, the ceiling lights reflected off his glasses, the glare hiding his eyes.

  “You understand?” He followed that up with something that sounded like “Marnafta.”