by Noir, Stella
Ethan smiles at the group, grabs the sides of his chair with his hands and drops his gaze to the floor, zoning out to the meds or the memory, I’m not entirely sure which.
I could listen to Ethan all day, and hearing him speak gives me the impression that it’s those kind of stories that he comes here to tell. He was obviously in love with his wife, I can hear it when his throat catches saying her name, and I can see it manifest itself in his actions. His smile, the way his eyes light up at the memory. I want to know what happened to him and why he lost all of that. I want to help him heal.
Ethan
10 November 2015. Fifty eight days after.
I tell the story about how Alice and I met, because I feel compelled to give something back to Jo. It’s her second session today, and already she looks more confident, more inclined to engage, more present in herself. She tells us what happened to her, in much more detail than most of the other members of the group have - Paul excluded -, and I mentally take a note of the name Jason Fleitman for subsequent research when I’m back in front of my laptop.
It’s not a name I recognize immediately, but if he’s just come through the system, it’s possible I haven’t added him yet. He could already be there, of course, and I’ve overlooked him. That could be possible too.
Jo tells her story in the same way most victims of rape do. She’s plain and precise and she doesn’t linger too long on the detail of how it made her feel. I find her testimony difficult to listen to, because it produces images inside my head of what may have happened the night that Alice was killed.
After she is finished, she takes a deep breath, and I wonder for a moment whether she is going to cry. I smile to show her that I have listened, and I understand her pain. I do understand her pain because I feel something similar every day. No-one deserves to go through what Jo, or Patricia or Alice, or the countless other rape victims have.
I lost my wife, but sometimes I feel like a fraud for being here. I wasn’t raped myself. Nobody forced themselves upon me and violated my personal, intimate space. They took from me the most important thing in my life, but sometimes I feel like what I feel, compared to what some other people have to go through, pales in comparison. Sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t be allowed to feel the way I do.
I change what I’m about to say because of that. I tell the story about how we met, and I find myself re-living the memory in a way I haven’t done for a long time. Whenever Alice and I used to meet new people, either at a party or at work or anywhere else, we’d tell a stripped down version of that story. It was our kind of icebreaker into a conversation. It’s been a long time since I’ve had any reason to bring it out, so it feels nice to do so here. You can only learn so much about somebody if they tell you the tragedy they’ve gone through, because it represents something passive, not active. It’s a situation in which they have no control. We learn almost nothing about that person beyond the one way they are forced to react.
It helps, of course, to tell it, it’s an essential part of the process of moving on, but it helps the teller of the story much more than the listener. It makes them feel liberated, but it does nothing to help us connect. I know Katy knows this. I know everyone else does to. That’s why most of the time we talk about stuff that doesn’t matter, we talk about how the weather was bad over the weekend, or our favorite TV shows, or other normal stuff that we find fill our lives now. I talk about running, and working the bag, and I listen to others talk about the jobs they’ve felt the courage to finally return to, or the kids that are struggling in school, or the holidays they want to go on.
I don’t talk about my future much, not my real future anyway. I talk about the goals I want to achieve with my exercise, and other stuff I think they’ll want to hear, but to be honest, I haven’t really thought much about it myself, beyond finding him and doing what I want to do to him. After that, I don’t know what I’ll do, I don’t think I’m going to have much purpose.
“Hey.”
Suddenly Jo’s up alongside me, and I wonder if I’ve been zoning out like normal, and she’s been there a really long time.
“Hey”, I say slowing down so she can fall in alongside me.
“I’m this way too, I thought we could walk together, that’s if you don’t mind.”
“Of course I don’t mind”, I say, and we walk together a little in silence, side by side.
“Your story was beautiful”, Jo says. “Thank you. It was lovely to hear it.”
I smile at her. I want to say ‘it doesn’t have a happy ending’, but I don’t think it would be fair. Jo’s trying to be nice and make a connection with me, and I appreciate that even though I’m happy not to have it.
“I’m sorry about what happened to you”, I say.
I see Jo’s eyes darken before she pulls them away. “I just want to forget about it now. My dad is the one that wants to see him punished. Hanged might be a more appropriate word. I don’t even know if I can cope with going to court. I’m-”, she pauses to look me in the eyes. “-a bit of a mess right now.”
At the intersection we part company. I watch her for a while isolated against the industrial bleakness that surrounds us, before I turn away and head up the hill for home.
I’m glad we talked, even if it was only to exchange a few words. Sometimes only a few words are enough to change the way you feel.
Chapter Fifteen
Ethan
12 November 2015. Sixty days after.
I buy a gun.
The old Ethan would never have done this, but the old Ethan died the same day my wife did, or later, the day I fastened that noose around my neck and tipped myself off the chair.
Alice was fiercely anti-guns. We both were. The idea of owning an instrument that had the potential to kill someone was not an idea we ever thought we would be likely to entertain. Perhaps if we’d done it earlier, Alice would still be here with us. I have these thoughts much more now. I guess that until something has been taken from you, you don’t realise what you could have done to protect it. What you should have done. If I was there, things would have been different. If Alice had a gun.
This isn’t middle America, and gun shops around here aren’t all that easy to come by. I find one though, just a little way out of town, and drive out there with no intention in mind other than to buy something suitable, I can guarantee will leave whoever I point it at certifiably dead.
I’m not interested in the latest models, or the biggest chambers, or any of the safety features, I want something lightweight, something I can conceal on my body, something that will destroy this thing that’s growing inside me.
I have never been in a gunshop before in my life. I guess if you don’t grow up around it, you never have a need to.
“Home protection?” the guy in the store asks me.
I tell him I just want something my wife can use to protect herself. That we live in a bad neighborhood and we’ve already been broken into once. That she needs something lightweight she can handle, but powerful enough to stop someone. I hesitate and he fills in the word for me.
“Dead?” he says, nodding slightly, rubbing the stubble of his chin, assessing me, giving me a story and a purpose and a future. “We can do that for you.”
Every American’s right. It feels colder in my hands than I thought it would, heavier.
“You ever fired a gun before?” he asks me.
The answer is clearly ‘no’, but I lie. I tell him my father and I used to go hunting. That I have a cousin in the police force, another in the national guard. It seems enough to convince him. I hold the gun up, aiming it towards the target he has on the wall behind him. I make a triangle with my legs, the weight shifted slightly to the back one, bend my knees and shut my left eye.
“Pow!” he says with a smile, as I squeeze the trigger.
Chapter Sixteen
Jo
13 November 2015. Forty seven days after.
Over six weeks have passed. Sometimes I find it impossible t
o believe that no matter what happens, the world refuses to stop turning. Day by day, minute by minute, molecule by molecule, nothing sits still. There is no state of absolute inactivity at any point, anywhere in this world, and it all goes in one direction only. We don’t stop moving forwards.
I’m going back to work. I think it’s a good decision. I’ve spent too much time in the house and too much time alone. I feel like I can’t breathe in here anymore, suffocated by the world I’m carefully trapping myself in. I’ve been going out, but still never at night time, and not for more than a couple of hours at a time. I get scared if I’m out alone so I try not to let that happen unless I absolutely need to.
I’ve also seen some friends, both from work and from outside of it. They still don’t know about what really happened to me, or why I stopped work in the first place.
As much as I’ve told anyone, is that there was a family crisis, and I’m seeing a therapist for depression. Some people think my parents are splitting up, some people think my brother is gay. After a while they just stop asking questions and let me get on with whatever it is I feel like I need to do. That, as I keep reminding myself, is to move on. Grieve, accept what happened and move on from it. Depressed is a lot more acceptable in this world than rape victim.
I’m going to start therapy too. Individual, one on one, no holds barred, make-me-better therapy. I know I said I was against it before, but I think it’s a good idea now. I feel better that I’ve opened up to the group, and I feel like I can do that again to a stranger, as long as I feel comfortable with them. Someone non threatening and completely non judgemental, like Ethan, for instance. I could easily open up to him.
I find myself thinking about him sometimes. There is so much pain amongst the other members of our group, I wonder if what I feel is valid enough. How can you measure pain? I wonder too, how some of these people can even move on with what’s happened to them. I makes me weep with despair at the things human beings are capable of. The things we do to each other in the name of need or selfishness or religion or war.
I Google Ethan. I don’t know his surname so I try keywords that eventually bring up a story I know instantly is his. I can’t finish the article. After I’m done, I rush to the bathroom and only just make it to the toilet bowl before I’m sick.
I feel so guilty that I’ve undermined his trust, that I delete my browser history, shut the laptop, pull out the cord and stand for a moment looking at it, as though half expecting it to disappear completely into thin air just because I want it to. I have the words going around my head, but now is the last time I need a cynical reminder. Time only goes forward.
I’m angry at myself for knowing something about him he hasn’t told me. The feeling fades a little as the day goes on, and I attempt to find argument to justify it - I already knew because I saw it on the news when it first came out or I just happened to mention you to a friend and they told me - but the lies seem worse than telling the truth. I find myself thinking more about it than is probably healthy, but at least it serves to take my mind off what is my usual topic of thought: having to see Jason Fleitman again.
I feel an urgent need to tell Ethan what I’ve done and apologize to him. It feels like looking through contacts of friends on facebook only to meet them after doing so, and knowing more about their lives than you have any right to, only in this case, it’s a million times worse.
The words stick in my head and won’t go away. Lacerations. Multiple fractures. Fourteen week old baby. The newspapers shouldn’t be allowed to print this shit. There was nothing at all after what happened to me.
I picture Ethan, and I picture everything that he has lost. I see him receiving the news, I see him at his dead wife’s side identifying her mutilated body, and I see the inside of him, his heart and his soul, ripped out and scarred completely, and I wonder if he’ll ever be able to overcome it.
I wonder too, if I have the strength I want to have to help him.
Chapter Seventeen
Ethan
16 November 2015. Sixty four days after.
This is the day it all begins again. Alice is two months dead. The new year is now less than that away, and I feel like I’ve been re-born. I’ve been running about twenty five miles a week, working the bag every morning, doing push ups, pull ups, squats, bench presses, thrusts, anything at all to keep myself in shape. To prepare myself for the fight. I’ve practically converted the basement into a gym, and I spend a lot of time down there now I’ve managed to hook up an internet connection too. Martin leaves me alone, just so long as I’m not planning on killing myself again, which I’m pretty sure he’s convinced I’m not. The gun is hidden in a box of Alice’s things, at the bottom of the closet in my room. It’ll never be found there. I’ve got good at concealing things recently. It’s become what I do.
I begin my search with James William Cutler. Battery, burglary, grand larceny, sexual assault - a real animal. Just looking at his photos makes my stomach turn over. His facebook page hasn’t been set to private, so I have several pages of information about his life, where he works, where he went to school, who his friends are, what kind of things he likes, the posts he’s commented on and the events or parties he’s gone to. He doesn’t look like a gangbanger, he looks like a weasel.
The internet is an incredibly powerful data mining tool, and within less than ten minutes, I have his home address, his rap sheet, his mobile phone number, almost everything down to his last known whereabouts.
We live in an age where everything about us is accessible. We volunteer that information for free, because we are led to believe it makes us happier, our lives, by turn, less complicated. Privacy doesn’t exist in the same way now as it did even ten years ago. After Alice was murdered, I went through the process of erasing her from the internet in the wake of a glut of newspaper articles and media coverage about the story.
They were digging up and using private and personal information that they had absolutely no consent by any of us that knew her to publish. It took me a long time to finally remove every trace of her I could, and if Martin hadn’t have been there to help me, there would have been no way I could have done it at all. A week after that I did the same for myself.
Traces and echoes of a person that no longer exist, both in my memory and by extension the collective memory around us they call the internet. Alice, myself, everyone else who ever had an online personality and is now no longer with us.
I killed my facebook account because I couldn’t control all of it. I still can’t control who wants to remember Alice, but I can control my own access to that information.
I don’t want to forget about Alice completely. I couldn’t, even if I did. She forms as much a part of me as any physical element of my body. It’s like she’s another sense, always there and activated by trigger responses i’m not consciously in control of. I don’t want my memories erased, but I don’t want to share them with anyone either who can use them against me.
James William Cutler takes less time than I expect to find. I recognize him instantly from the photos he has on his facebook account, the others I found with a simple google search for his name. My heart leaps to my throat when he passes the car I’m sat in, close enough for me to reach out and touch him. This could be the man who raped and killed my wife. This could be the man that destroyed my life.
The gun is in my lap, already loaded, squashed between my thighs and hidden by a newspaper I pretend to read. I don’t have a plan other than to watch, to see him, to see how I would feel seeing him, to work out what to do. I know immediately that I’m out of my depth. I bury that feeling and concentrate on the other one. The darkness consuming me. The rage I feel, the fear Alice felt.
Cutler is alone. He strides confidently past the car, crosses the road and heads towards his apartment block. He doesn’t see me or if he does, he doesn’t make it apparent. He has no reason to believe his life’s in danger. Less than half a minute later he has disappeared inside, and I’ve lost him to
the inner workings of the building.
I’ve been parked here for only an hour and a half. Sixty four days and the police have done nothing, I’ve spent a couple of weeks collecting names and less than two hours to find one of them. Maybe the police have already checked him out, but maybe the police didn’t ask the right questions either. That crosses my mind. Cutler may turn out to be innocent of my wife’s murder, but he’s not innocent of sexual assault. He has that on his sheet in block capital letters. Someone’s pain is his responsibility. He’s violated someone’s intimacy and they’ll never get that back.
I touch the gun just to make sure it’s there, and the cold steel of the barrel responds accordingly.
If he doesn’t come out again, I’m going in. If he doesn’t come out again, he may never do so.
Chapter Eighteen
Jo
17 November 2015. Fifty one days after.
It’s my first day back at work, and I feel even more nervous than I did on the very first day I started here. Alex has allowed me to begin slowly, just so I can adjust myself to the change. So I can ease myself back in to normality.
Knowing Alex, I half expect him to announce my return by standing on a chair in the middle of the office floor and encouraging me to do the same. Thankfully, he doesn’t. Thankfully, despite the time I’ve been away, despite the vagueness over the reasons for doing so, not much seems to have changed. I get enthusiastic welcomes back from the team, but after that, it’s as if I never left. It reminds me of the group therapy session, and the difference between the fear of telling my story, and having that story then told. People move on quickly. People seem to adapt to change much more than we ever expect. I wonder if I have too, about what happened to me. I wonder if now, almost two months after it happened, when I think of what he did to me, I underestimate the pain he caused me, or under appreciate exactly the trauma he caused me to go through.